What Do You Need To Believe? Why?

I'm not sure.

 

In most cases, there is a social component for me. That's just the way my brain works. It it was all about me, then it would seem okay to be a criminal, and I can't rationalize that.

 

Like Robin Hood?

 

So if the social component is missing it would seem okay to be a criminal?

But that would mean that your beliefs are not running very deep.

 

need to believe?
i don't understand "need" to "believe".
i understand not denying that nothing has to have anything to do with anything i or anyone else thinks they know about it, in order to exist.
or even for any of us to imagine that it might.

to reply to theghost's "So if the social component is missing it would seem okay to be a criminal?"

if no one else existed for there to be a "social component", what crime would there be to commit? other then against yourself by destroying whatever made your existence possible.

 

I had a spiritual journal a couple years ago, until then I had been a strong Christian. I believe we are brain washed as children and there comes a time when we must decide what we believe, not what our parents say, the bible says, or a pastor says.
I do not think Jesus is the only way bc that means all the Indians went to hell.
I also think the bible was change everytime it was updated.
I am not saying I am right, but I am with what I believe.
I am not sure that hell was not invented to scare us straight.
Maybe there is or isn't a heaven, or even a god.
I do think we as humans have the need to believe in something- just to feel better.

 

how do I send you a message? I noticed you have sent me 2. I cant figure out how

 

Can't do it yet. Before long, you'll have enough posts and enough time here that you can send and receive private messages. I don't remember exactly what the numbers are.

 

You Rock! Thanks doll

 

We need to believe in ourselves amidst the things of the world, and we need God to have those beliefs sustained. I also need to explain there is only one God for all, there is the true God of the Religion that people share credence for as of the world they commonly occupy. I won't at this time. People may lie for themselves to be moral-proof. People may realize a higher infallibility.

 

You give a couple of good examples, evolution and climate change, that illustrate why I think faith is necessary. Martin Luther said that faith is a "joyful bet". I think of faith as an educated bet in the absence of certainty. I'm a Christian, but I happen to believe that the evidence for both evolution and global warming is convincing and requiring action. In the case of evolution, we face decisions on what to teach our kids. In the case of climate change, we face decisions about what, if any, public policy decisions to support, and who to vote for to take appropriate action. They both seem like easy decisions. But I must face the realities that in both cases the conclusions are uncertain. Like all scientific theories, they're based on inferences and probabilities, and are thus strictly speaking tentative. So the dichotomy between "belief" and "fact" is a false one. In the real world, and on most of the controversial issues that count the most, "facts" are ambiguous and disputed, and can take us only so far. Especially if we lack expertise on the matter concerned, we end up flying by the seats of our pants.

The theory of evolution by process of natural selection is well-tested, with support from countless peer-reviewed studies from a wide variety of scientific fields. Yet a minority of scientists, who aren't exactly slouches, adhere to Intelligent Design and make rational arguments in support of it. They explain away the consensus of secular scientists as the result of naturalistic biases. Dr. Michael Behe and Dr. William Dembsky are probably the best known of these, but the Discovery Institute maintains quite a stable of them. There's an old adage that when experts disagree, non-experts should suspend judgment. That would be the "agnostic" position. But that would abandon our kids to the fundies on school boards.

Instead, I try to follow an informed course of action in deciding which experts to trust, admitting that this involves a certain amount of guesswork. I tend to go with the consensus of experts in the field, rather than with those on the fringes of their disciplines who work for outfits that seem to have a religious, ideological or corporate mission. I've also been influenced by two evolutionary scientists who have solid scientific credentials and are also devout Christians: Geneticist Dr. Francis Collins, NIH director, former head of the Human Genome Project, and born-again Evangelical Christian; and Dr. Kenneth Miller, Brown University Professor of molecular biology and devout Catholic, whose testimony at the Dover textbook trial carried the day for Darwin against ID and his fellow Catholic, Dr. Behe. My decision to put my trust in natural selection, Collins and Miller instead of ID, Behe, and Dembsky is supported by substantial evidence but is, in the last analysis, a question of trust based on intuition and judgment, i.e., faith.

Likewise, the theory of global warming has the support of a strong consensus of climate scientists represented by the International Panel on Climate Change, but it's heavily based on computer modeling plus observed temperature rises and melting that correlates with levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. There are, of course, holdouts among scientists who have put their names on various petitions and letters to Congress opposing the theory of human-induced climate change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
Jim Inhofe, one of the Senators from my state who chairs the U.S. Senate Committee dealing with the issue, calls global warming a "hoax", and a sizeable percentage of Republican voters nationwide seem to agree with him. I also have a good friend with a Ph.D. in engineering who is a leading researcher on wind energy and therefore should be biased in favor of the global warming theory. But he agrees with Inhofe, and he's not even a Republican. But in the absence of the scientific knowledge to make a truly informed decision, I still believe in global warming and support climate control legislation. I suspect that most of the scientists opposing the theory are energy company stooges, I know that Inhofe is in the oil companies' hip pocket, and my friend, the engineer, tends to be a contrarian who would oppose scientific consensus just to be ornery. Once again, I think my decision isn't irrational, but it's ultimately based on a leap of faith, or at least a hop of faith.

 

Reading back over this thread, I see that we talked about big, complex issues, but we often do the same thing with smaller, simpler issues as well. For example, most of us feel a need to believe that driving a car every day is reasonably safe, so that's what we tell ourselves, in spite of the statistical evidence. Our feeling of control behind the wheel is largely an illusion. Many of us act as if flying in a jet is a high risk activity, because most of us can avoid it more easily than we can avoid cars. I think this form of rationalization reveals a fundamental flaw in human reasoning.

 

But driving in a car is reasonably safe.

 

The average driver will be in at least one accident in their lifetime; most, more than one. Look at the numbers. For some demographic groups, auto accidents are among the leading causes of death.

Americans are terrible at understandings risks and probabilities. This frustrates me very much.

 

There's a psychological literature called "decision heuristicss" that deals with these cognitive anomalies. Paul Slovik, Baruch Fischoff, and others found major discrepancies between risk perception by so-called "experts" and ordinary folks on risk perception. To the "experts" (meaning technocrats and scientists), the risk of exposure to medical and dental X-rays, driving a car, skiing, or smoking is greater than say, living next to a nuclear power plant or a hazardous waste facility. Ordinary folks tend to perceive the nuclear and hazardous waste sites as riskier--apparentlly because the decisions to drive, ski, or smoke are voluntary, while siting decisions tend to be involuntary (unless they move to the site). Also, it seems to make a difference to the lay people how the benefits and burdens of the risk are distributed. If the burdens are shouldered by the local community and the profits are reaped by some distant corporation, the risk is perceived to be greater. And familiar risks, like respiratory problems tend to be accepted better than unfamiliar ones, like genetically engineered micro-organisms.

 

Statistics never tell the entire story, and certainly not in the way in which you're trying to use them.

Two potential problems I can see right away in the manner you used "the numbers" about car accidents are

A) What is defined as an accident?
B) Is not death by auto accident more prevalent than death by plane accident because of there being a larger amount of drivers?

Both of these questions are important for establishing if people's assessment of the dangers of driving a car is "reasonable" or not.

And furthermore, I still can't tell whether or not you are claiming that driving a car is not reasonably safe.

What you seem to be saying is that driving a car is less safe than flying, but yet since "many of us" fear flying, this is evidence of a faulty human reasoning and that "Americans" are terrible at understanding risks and probabilities.

If so, a lot of your claims bother me.

I'm not convinced that more people are afraid of flying than driving.
I'm not convinced that it is unreasonable to be afraid of flying.
I'm not convinced that it is unreasonable to not be afraid of driving.
I'm not convinced that any of this is faulty human reasoning.
I'm not convinced that any of this is evidence that Americans are terrible at understanding risk and probabilities.

 

I need to believe in love I just do I don't like thinking it's not real I feel like I know it doesn't but sometimes I see people doing such dumb shit that I'm like oh it must be love

 

Love is real. No doubt in my mind about it.

It's not a belief, but an experience. One of the most fundamental experiences of human life.

 

No. We're talking about rates and percentages, not totals.

 

i am reasured by the observable diversity of existence, that few things if any, are ever all one way. i'm not sure i understand the question about needing to believe.

there are things i do believe though, because i've experienced them, and by that i don't mean because of what someone or some book had to say about anything.

i believe invisible things are mostly harmless, because our own egos are more then sufficient to account for everything that is not.