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L K Day wrote:Intelligent people don't believe that intelligent people don't have beliefs.

day to day activities require a certain amount of belief, but usually based on evidence to support the belief. When it comes to science, or questions about the world, belief is a bad word.

krampus wrote:

Shamis wrote:The stress of having to constantly re-evaluate your beliefs when most of reality refutes them isn't fun though, especially for intelligent people who refuse to give up on their faith. I'm glad I got out of that game.

I see your point, but I think that intelligent people should constantly question and re-evaluate their beliefs, every situation should be assesed and incorporated into ones beliefs.

If you incorporate all of that knowledge into your belief system, then it might cease to be a belief system, and start to be a reasonable way of living based on the way things really are.

yeah, but I am defining my beliefs as the basis upon which I make a decision, I will always have beliefs, and hopefully they will always be changing.

Don't believe in anything. Either know it or suspect it or think it might be. Belief is for fools.

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Science is just like religion only it is open to change. I believe in Newtons laws but relatively speaking they are incomplete, and thus my beliefs had to change. But again, I may be defining the term beliefs differently.


Wow, Iraq to metaphysics in one thread.......the universe is all connected

The stuff of science is to relate unknown thing 1 to known things 2-x. The thread that intricately describes these relationships we call theory. I like Alan Evil's post above, with the edition that if the belief 1 does not relate to things 2-y and we don't even have an inkling as to how it could, then belief 1 is metaphysical and it should be discarded until it can be associated into a unified world view. We certainly should not kill or pray or waste our sundays based on belief 1.

There are a couple of interesting mental exercises I've undertaken in the past and they really open your eyes about how your own mind works.

One exercise was to stop using the word "is" in any form while speaking. Since the world comes to you through your senses everything is second hand, in a way, and your senses can fool you so instead of saying, "the lamp is blue" you would say, "the lamp looks blue to me" or "the lamp appears to be blue." By constantly observing your speech and modifying it your perceptions of the world change. It's a strange sensation. A side bonus to this exercise is how quickly you can weird someone out just by talking to them.

The other exercise is to stop saying you believe anything. Even a "believer" can do this experiment so something like, "I believe in hell" would change to "The Bible tells me hell exists." You'd be surprised how often and casually we say we believe something. I was amazed at how often I had to stop myself at first and by "I believe" I usually meant "I think I remember" or "It seems to me that."



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true, but I think you are focusing too much on ritualistic beliefs, which I completely agree that if you don't really know how belief 1 relates to anything else then it is just a superstition, and just because thousands of people hold the same superstition, it does not make it true. But a good scientist, when confronted with a completely foreign situation must base his/her actions on a belief that may or may not be related to things 2-y, and he/she will continue to loosely hold this belief until he/she proves 1 and y to be unrelated, at which time the scientist must form and hold a new belief, belief x, until relationships either hold up or do not.

simple example: The world is flat. Everything about my daily life does not contradict my belief that the world is flat. Therefore it should not be too far fetched to believe that it should also come to an end. A scientist, however, would try to find the end and re-evaluate this belief based on what he finds. The sheep of the world accept what they are told initially by the scientist and are afraid to find the end of the world and possibly a new set of beliefs.

I really like both of those ideas alan, I may have to try them.

good ideas alan....I think that is the coolest thing to date you have posted.