Love, as far as belief is concerned, is a verb, an action, in that we cherish this idea/belief, we might nurture this idea/belief, and we may also try to share/spread this idea/belief in much the same manner as we would share/spread charity.
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Is belief a choice?
- Thread starter idav
- Start date
Warren Clark
Informer
agreed. i think i am getting lost in a play with words.
I was always trying to distinguish between the things we can't control, like stuff that have biological reasons. Still, when you just meet someone, aren't there reasons you like/dislike them? What would "we just click" supposed to mean? You don't just meet someone and go "oh they have magical eyes, i'm in love"?
Also what about choosing to love your enemy?
This part isn't always true. People of faith can and do have doubts just like anyone else. With religious faith there is some or many premises that they choose to take up on faith. It starts getting complicated depending on how much assuming has to take place.
Draka
Wonder Woman
Yes, there are reasons why you may like or dislike someone, but as to why you love someone, that is usually not so easily defined. As to "magical eyes"...I think you are referring more to infatuation than actual genuine love. People tend to get infatuated with others easily enough, but that doesn't speak to actual love.
How does "choosing to love your enemy" work?
Not easily defined is true. Love is a combination of emotions so it gets complicated very fast. There is a spectrum of types of love and they all have to do with liking certain humans for various reasons.
What are reasons for love it doesn't just come out of thin air? You mentioned it wouldn't be just in the eyes. Is it a soul-mates thing? I'm just not understanding where you are saying these feelings come from.
Some will confuse lust for love so whether someone gets into a physical relationship doesn't say much about love either unless one places that sort of sacred emphasis on physical relationships.
Love is also a series of various chemicals which we can easily get from other places. Once someone becomes an addict though there may very well be no choice left but we choose and decide to do the things that trigger all of it.
Cause you can't choose who your brother is.
And that response alone is (IMO) fairly good evidence that you are a rational and intelligent individual (of course, whether or not my opinion has any validity rests in part on my own "idiocy" factor).
There is an oft quoted dictum that "minds are like parachutes: they only function when open." And while this is true to a certain extent, there is the issue of having so open a mind that one's brains fall out,
More importantly, there is the issue of equating stupidity with the adoption of a particular religious view (even with the caveat "stuck in one religion or sect", as it is rather hard to determine whether another is "stuck"). Until rather recently (and thanks in part to this forum), I didn't realize my own bias not so much against those who belong to some religion as for those who do not. I never believed that being religious entailed stupidity, as apart from anything else, my father was brought up in both a highly intellectual environment and one without any religious or spiritual views, yet he converted to Catholicism before I was born (and I have a hard time believing this is the result of stupidity for a number of reasons, including the fact that he receieved his undergrad degree in physics from Dartmouth and his law degree from Cornell, which I would think requires at least an average amount of intelligence). Yet after abandoning the faith in which I was raised, I seem to have somehow unconsciously tended to believe that agnostics and atheists are more rational and open-minded, at least when it comes to science.
I realized this bias here thanks to a few discussions with those who had no religious affiliation yet clung dogmatically to a particular stance on some philosophical and/or scientific issue anyway.
Having already studied the effect of worldview (religious or not) and how much it can hinder one's ability to evaluate a given topic with minimal bias (I even had a paper published on the subject), it was something of a revelation to realize that although I had never equated religious views with close-mindedness nor with stupidity, I had somehow accorded those without such views with an unwarranted rationality.
We are all to some extent products of our environment, and we all have a framework through which we interpret everything. At best we can aspire to recognize as much of our own biases as possible, and attempt to question whatever assumptions or beliefs we hold (if only to reaffirm their validity).
Indoctrination is a given, unless one is raised without human interaction (i.e., feral children). And religion is hardly the only dogma out there (if they 20th century demonstrated anything, it's that socio-political indoctrination and dogma can be just as pervasive, just as destructive, and just as all-encompassing as religious dogma). It's certainly true that many people never leave the religions they were raised in because they were either never taught to question it (or taught never to question it), or they were simply never taught to question, reason, analyze, etc., at all. It is also certainly true that religion, by its very nature, entails a certain amount of faith which I would argue is not required by agnosticism or atheism. That said, the reason I eventually decided I did not believe in the faith in which I was raised has a great deal to do with the way my parents (and in particular my father) forced me to question, defend, and think about any and all opinions I had.
Draka
Wonder Woman
Why do you have this need to define and label and find reasons for love? What is this need to box and label it so?
While the chemical bonding part does come into play, especially in childbirth and nursing, that isn't all there is to it. You just seem so badly to want to boil love down to something analytical and logical and cold and scientific. You can't do that with love, fear, desire, hunger. Some things are base. Our driving forces within us. Not everything about us is easily explainable and follows a simple pattern. We're messy creatures, we live messy lives, we love messy as well. It's what we are.
Still have no clue what you are talking about here.
Cause I'm more left brained than right.
We are nurture vs. nature/self. I want to know the cause of my nature cause the knowledge gives power to control it or at least a fighting chance.
Love for your enemy would be equal to love for nature in general. I wouldn't say I have a general hate for the world and it's bad things, as we say it is part of nature. Try to show an enemy a different way by example, ghandi proved it is most effective.
Gui10
Active Member
I think, if your IQ allows it, there might come a time in your life where you can ''choose'', or rather, ''determine'' the most righteous path. I think some people who lack IQ, or a specific part of intelligence, have no choice and are ''doomed'' to follow whatever religion they have been raised in or brainwashed to.
Heartfelt forgiveness.
I don't see how you can answer this question except in relation to free-will. If you believe in free will, then you likely believe that you have some measure of control over what you believe. If you don't believe in free-will, then nothing is a decision that you make.
Renji
Well-Known Member
Perhaps if a person is "wired" to believe a particular belief through different influences (like people surrounding him/her), then it's not really the person's choice. But when a person, through his or her own capacity to think chooses which to believe and which not to believe in, then it's his or her own choice.
nightingale.sc
New Member
I think not because it is not practical
I'm interested in the volitional aspects of holding an idea to be the truth aside from paths we are unable to steer toward.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you talking about obsession?
The free will problem is a problem of volition. Though some may argue that organisms don't have free will, we still maintain that we have volition. So with belief I'm trying to focus on the aspects that come from choice rather than the things that come where we have no control over outcomes.
Obsessions and addictions are interesting in that they start to hinder our own volition. So we still hold people accountable for what they do even if they say they had no choice.
For some to say that we have no choice in who we like or dislike sounds a bit extreme, there are certainly things we like/dislike about people, just as much as there are things we are willing to ignore.
Absolutely is a choice. One can believe that green mermaids live on Haley's comet with or without data or facts.
Beliefs are influenced by our environment, among other things, but it is absolutely controllable.