And correctness of perception

People seem to believe in themselves and their perceptions

Kids believe all kinds of things with no proof when they are trying to figure out the world (my 4 year old once decided that a power plant that was spewing steam out of chimney in the winter was a cloud maker. The steam was very similar in appearance to clouds. Since she was 4 - I didn't correct her and let her keep her magical moment for a few more years).

How many people think their nation or place of birth or residence is just another place with both good and bad attributes much like any other? Some certainly, but then some aren't religious.

Last edited Tue Jun 26, 2012, 01:24 PM - Edit history (1)

They deny the humanity of humans outside of their area, and often support direct harm to others.

Many of the most prominent atheists fall for this form of obvious stupidity and extreme bigotry: Hitchens, Harris, Maher (agnostic), etc. These morally retarded thinkers support or rationalize atrocities against Arabs or other Muslims.

I suppose that it is the obvious stupidity of religion that makes it easy for these terrible thinkers to dominate the anti religion movement and support stupidity themselves - being against religion is no great achievement.

Or just watch one step onto an elevator. Logic is all about perception.

I've watched quite a few blind people negotiate the real world. Their demands for tangible proof are manifest.

The same way children trust their parents. Parents are their gods and they pass along their beliefs.
I think everybody suffers from blind faith, in a way, or the world would prove too difficult to navigate. We make assumptions built on experience, so we don't considerate ourselves blind, but in reality, we are blinded by our desire to trust.
We trust those we love because we want to. Religion is no different. The believers want to believe. That doesn't make them stupid or ignorant. It just makes them human.

... there are also sighted people who just come to trust the road, when suddenly a stop light appears where one never existed before.

There is the idea that Democracy and unfettered free market capitalism are hopelessly intertwined, that you cannot have one without the other. Furthermore that it is at best unpatriotic and at worse treasonous to criticize either institution. This is why the most effective boogeyman labeling the Right can come up with to use against Obama is to call him a Socialist. He is anything but of course but it works anyway. You can try to tell such people that we have always had socialized sectors within our economy (fire departments, police, utilities, etc.) but it's as if they can't hear you. All they know is that free markets are good and socialism is the same as Communism and if you dare to say otherwise you are a threat to Mom and baseball and apple pie.

Even Capitalists don't ask you to believe in invisible friends that live in the sky though so... maybe not the same.

there are institutions of government that can be examined.

The only difference I see between faith and fact is that we want the first to become the second.
In a perfect universe, all the signs lead to the truth, nobody tries to fuck with your head along the way. If the sign on the door says bathroom, that's what you hope to find. But IRL it isn't so easy. False gods, misleading signs, semantics, egos, they all play a part.

Faith is belief in the absence of evidence. It isn't contingent on facts and is easier to maintain when there are no related facts.

I can't honestly say that the things I believe are what I want to believe. There's too much about the world and the universe that I would much rather be different. Unfortunately for me, Nature doesn't care what I think about her.

Space is unnervingly vast, nothing makes intuitive sense at the atomic (and smaller) scale, children are born with fatal birth defects, there is unimaginable suffering in the world and none of it serves any purpose. I sincerely wish that none of that were true and yet the evidence available does not allow me to believe so.

By the way, when you say that false gods play a part in making things difficult, are you implying that there are true gods? I suspect the answer is "no," but I'm curious all the same.

Several weeks ago, a sign appeared over one of the sinks in the men's room that read:

"Caution! Hot water!"

Umm, well, yeah OK. I have come to expect hot water at bathroom sinks. I would hazard a guess that the real meaning intended was something verbose like:

"Caution! The hot water source for this sink is dangerously hot! Do not use it!"

I toyed with the idea of creating a "Caution! Hot water!" sign and hanging it over one of the urinals.

After that, we each have to draw our own conclusions (or not). Descartes thought this axiom implied that a deity exists. Others have debated the veracity of that conclusion. I'm with David Hume: no miracles, and no hearsay.

of personality disorders. There are some "disciplines" out there that are easily as wacko as any religion and have exactly the same hard data supporting them.

Or check out the dungeon here on DU where the conspiracy nuts hang out. That stuff just gets loonier and loonier.

Then there are the food faddists who think every single illness out there is from eating the wrong food, the wrong food never being specified, although general statements about sugar and white flour are often made.

Oh, and we can't leave out the Randorrhoids. Some of them have managed to discard god and religion the way their fearless leader did when she was writing bad fiction. But oh my gawd, do they believe and they are unshakable.

There are plenty of stupid belief systems that don't involve religion but they mostly all involve faith in one charismatic character or another who would never lie to anyone, you know.

The odds are agin it, but it's fun to believe for a while. It's like a relatively harmless version of religion.

There is empirical data about this team you have faith in.

It's that "our team" is best intuitive belief that I mean.

(Among other things that isn't allowed for discussion on DU.)

Neo-classical economics is little more than a faith-based ideology.

Obama's taking all your guns
etc, ad nauseum...

Oh wait. There's actually some evidence for that - it's not 100% no proof. (At least, more than that he was a water-walking, dead-raising historical person.)

(with all due apologies to anyone from Chicago)