Do we choose what we believe?

Do we choose our beliefs?

  • Yes – We freely choose what we believe

    Votes: 2 50.0%

  • No – Belief is not a matter of choice / free will

    Votes: 2 50.0%
  • Total voters
    4
The line “but you sense that there must be something more” in the story is about a person peripherally sensing that he is in denial about his dysfunctional lifestyle choices. He is free to choose a different path that would probably be more true to himself but he chooses to ride his twisted belief all the way to a painful “bottom” instead.
Similarly we sense that we don’t know as much as we think we know and could choose to question, open, and arrive at even better beliefs than the ones we already have, but out of fearful dependency we often cling to a false or limited certainty. It gives us a sense of security, even if not a true security. But we are always free to adopt Socrates’ admonition to know that we don’t know, and to be open to new beliefs that never even dawned on us before. Still, we do tend to be slaves, fearful of the unknown, so we tend to keep betting on the same old horse even if he’s losing almost every race.
 
wil said:
I am totally on the yes; but scale.

Some folks are.free to choose since birth. In one case because their parents didn't coach them on what to think, just taught them how to think (rare)

In another case if the parent taught them nothing in the way of belief.

But most of us grow up with parents of similar beliefs which is passed on to to their child, some in forms which get referred to as indoctrination others may say child abuse.

In severe cases folks are.grown up in communities or countries that go beyond peer.pressure and include parochial school, daily readings (or more often), laws and punishments for not abiding, maybe ostracization for non compliance or worse.

However ...even in the worst case scenario people.have chose, despite repercussions gone against the teachings of their elders and moved on to a new belief...hence, yes, vut.
Click to expand...
In one counseling session I recall, a lady who was supposedly in the depression cycle of her bipolar disorder shared all kinds of self degradation related to rigid religious ideology from her childhood through adulthood. I don’t recall her specific belief about what or how God is, but I blurted out “ you can choose to see God however you want (or perhaps I said whatever works best for you) her mood immediately lifted as though she had been released from mental and spiritual shackles. It may have been only a momentary catharsis (it was an after hours drop in counseling service and she was not on my regular caseload). But it certainly indicated a cognitive component to the so-called biochemical condition of bipolar disorder. Of course the diagnosis could have been wrong. She apparently chose to believe what I said because her prior belief wasn’t bearing very good fruit for her. It was as if no one ever told her she could choose her own beliefs.
 
otherbrother said:
In one counseling session I recall, a lady who was supposedly in the depression cycle of her bipolar disorder shared all kinds of self degradation related to rigid religious ideology from her childhood through adulthood. I don’t recall her specific belief about what or how God is, but I blurted out “ you can choose to see God however you want (or perhaps I said whatever works best for you) her mood immediately lifted as though she had been released from mental and spiritual shackles. It may have been only a momentary catharsis (it was an after hours drop in counseling service and she was not on my regular caseload). But it certainly indicated a cognitive component to the so-called biochemical condition of bipolar disorder. Of course the diagnosis could have been wrong. She apparently chose to believe what I said because her prior belief wasn’t bearing very good fruit for her. It was as if no one ever told her she could choose her own beliefs.
Click to expand...
She didn't choose to believe what you said.
Your words convinced her it was true and belief followed automatically from that.
That's how belief works.
PERSUASION --> CONVICTION ---> BELIEF
LACK OF PERSUASION -->LACK OF CONVICTION--> DISBELIEF
 
Yes. But what we choose is influenced by what we know and have experienced in life. Some people change their beliefs about certain matters when they are introduced to new experiences and information. Some people will stick to their beliefs no matter what they learn or experience.
 
Blindwatchmaker said:
She didn't choose to believe what you said.
Your words convinced her it was true and belief followed automatically from that.
That's how belief works.
PERSUASION --> CONVICTION ---> BELIEF
LACK OF PERSUASION -->LACK OF CONVICTION--> DISBELIEF
Click to expand...
I see that we have a semantics problem here. You are saying she truly believed (but hadn’t owned it yet) what I said. And I think you are right. But I would not call it her “belief” if she hadn’t owned it yet. I am talking about belief (IMO), and you are talking about conviction. We believe all sorts of that don’t resonate deeply with our True Self. We only gradually discover our True Self and our true convictions. We choose whatever level of depth of understanding by latching onto various notions.
This that I shared with Thomas on my thread God as a Self Fulfilling Prophecy, seems highly pertinent to our discussion here, even though I think we are caught up in a semantics issue:
This is wonder-full. Again, two sincere minds disagreeing, but (at least in my case, and probably in yours also ) finding some merit in what each other is saying. I agree that there is risk of ego contamination in my preferred belief/approach about God. Now I can offer something that could be useful both here and in the Do We Choose Our Beliefs thread:
Humans develop socially and interpersonally (which to me is a subset of “social”) through 3 stages:
Dependence
Independence
Interdependence (one could speculate a fourth, interINdependece, stage, but that can wait for later).

The clinical experience of the guilt ridden client who was relieved to hear my opinion that we are free to conceptualize God in whatever way rings true to us (and/or works for us) showed me how psychologically damaging lower/rigid forms of religion can be. From this point on, my preference was to liberate people from the dependency stage of religious conceptualization and life-shaping practice (herminutics? Sp?). I CHOOSE the belief that God is a useful tool or a destructive device (weapon, poison), according to how it either frees us to grow/develop or stunts our growth. Modern culture may be stuck in the independence stage, but that stage is the stepping stone for the stage that I (and probably you also) long for: interdependence. All my life, church painted a picture of a world based on love. Even though I soon discovered that some conditional love tribalism was contaminating the concept of a kingdom of love, it was the future world I decided to try to help bring about. Later in life, as I noticed people being culturally shaped by a world singing in the key of competition, competition, competition, I began to doubt the Church’s sincerity about facilitating a loving world. No intentional culture shaping or system shaping was being offered by the Church, other than advocating something that seemed stuck in the tribal/traditional/authoritarian dependency stage.
As a person who is concerned with the welfare of fellow human beings (all of them. not just some of them), I chose to promote spiritual EMPOWERMENT. It is something an independent individual needs in order to fully enter into interdependence and a culture and society based on caring and love. Only via spiritual empowerment can a person give of themselves with a glad heart towards shaping the heaven on earth that Christians (and all truly spiritual people) are called to do.
So, using a cost/benefit analysis of sorts, I choose to embrace metaphysical speculations/theories that promote spiritual empowerment rather than those that lean towards conforming to moral standards (dependence stage orientation). To me, true morality (with a glad heart and full appreciation and understanding) can only come about after a person, as an individual, chooses Love.
So the potentially heavy “cost” of an egoist praying for God to give her (Janice Joplin!) a Mercedes Benz, is for me outweighed by the potential benefits of wholeheartedly and eyes-wide-openly choosing Love.
I don’t know what my client ended up doing with my advice. She may have later chosen to put the mental shackles back on. Being an individual with free will might have been a bridge too far for her, since she had been indoctrinated (and her friends and family) in the dependency stage. But I would like to think my intervention became a developmental stepping stone for her to fully embrace God’s love (or just “Love,”
if it moved her to become an atheist or agnostic).
 
Last edited:
Blindwatchmaker said:
She didn't choose to believe what you said.
Your words convinced her it was true and belief followed automatically from that.
That's how belief works.
PERSUASION --> CONVICTION ---> BELIEF
LACK OF PERSUASION -->LACK OF CONVICTION--> DISBELIEF
Click to expand...
I didn’t make her change her belief, SHE chose to believe that what I said was what rang truer to her than the belief she had been holding up to that point. She could have chosen to think that I was misleading her, a demon of sorts. “Get behind me Satan!”
But she chose to believe what I was saying about God, instead of what she thought about God before that.
 
Thomas said:
n all three cases, there seems to be a 'turning moment' which does not logically follow any process of the operation of the will – they were all 'accidental' – and are described in the language of 'inspiration', 'realisation', 'enlightenment', etc.
Click to expand...
Those were enlightening STATES, but they each were wise enough to choose to use those states as a basis for forming a new STAGE of understanding and being.
You dream of being in an elevator. The door opens. You see things on that floor, but you didn’t get out of the elevator and go into the floor.
This means you had an enlightened state, but haven’t yet entered the stage work that conforms to the enlightened view.
In your examples, the states were very compelling, but each CHOSE to highlight the glimpse and read it over and over again. Other stories of “God” talking to us may end up with us not really listening to what “God” or Deepest Self was saying. The state never materialized into a stage.
Thank (or curse if you prefer!) Ken Wilber for the distinction between state and stage. Wilber got in the weeds too much for me, but some of his conceptualizations are very useful as far as I’m concerned. This distinction between state and stage is one of them.
 
Blindwatchmaker said:
If free will exists then it would determine what we choose to DO but not what we find convincing or persuasive.
Click to expand...
Ah, but isn't what we find convincing or persuasive often the very thing that shapes what we choose to do? Free will seems to be entangled in both our actions and our beliefs, doesn't it?
 
This brings me closer to the reason (why I choose) to believe that the God Function is more important than any form or characteristic we might attribute to God. Function over Form. I even said in another thread (God as Self Fulfilling Prophecy) that the main reason I choose to believe in God is because when I pray to God or thank God or feel God’s presence, it really works for me. The horse I bet on wins. A God beyond use is useless.
Interesting that deep physics (Quantum physics) also emphasizes function, as in the “quantum wave function,” probably because the wavy energy like behavior going on at the subatomic level is easier to describe as a verb than a noun. Science can see its effects better than it can see its exact form. And, for that “matter” (pun intended!) what good does us to speak of God’s form when (Thomas, we seem to agree on this) His/Her/Its form is different than form in the physical realm? We can experience the effect of something transcendent of our current concepts of form much much better than we can discern its form. What we can do though in terms of approximating God’s form or “nature,” is focus on the phenomenon of God functioning in our physical existence. We may then choose certain formal characteristics that seem to fit with those experiences, such as God being a loving God (because God helps us transcend ego and reach out in/with love). And one reason I CHOOSE to look at God as a function is that it makes God more USEFUL in my life. The God Function is more real than my made-up mental tags of God (if such even exists as a “being.” God could be a Universal Process instead of a being per se, but a being like me would tend to collapse that wave into a particle).
These are reasons I CHOOSE function over form when it comes to God or when God comes to me.
 
Ahanu said:
but we can all say it arose from his disciplined effort with his chosen information diet that he observed every day without fail. He created a certain environment for certain feelings and beliefs to arise.
Click to expand...
Well, sort of. He chose the information diet based on pre-existing beliefs.
If you choose to take in a lot of opposing viewpoints, especially from an extreme opposite point of view from your own, you won't necessarily become indoctrinated to that POV. You may just be stressed and angry all the time. (I've tried, sort of, in mild form)
 
Blindwatchmaker said:
You can choose to expose yourself to different ideas. You can choose to reflect, question, even meditate or pray. But the actual moment of belief — the mental state of being convinced that something is true — isn’t something you can switch on by will. If I asked you right now to believe that the moon is made of cheese, or that Vishnu is the one true God, you couldn’t do it sincerely. Not unless something genuinely persuaded you.
Click to expand...
I agree.
 
wil said:
Absolutely! Agree on both counts.

But I do differentiate between the cultural context of indoctrination of our Mennonite friend who was here for a while and the indoctrination of folks who don't teach their children there is only one way to believe and choose to expose their children to multiple paths and allow them to choose which to explore more of
Click to expand...
wil said:
our Mennonite friend who was here for a while
Click to expand...
Probably before my time?
 
otherbrother said:
She apparently chose to believe what I said because her prior belief wasn’t bearing very good fruit for her. It was as if no one ever told her she could choose her own beliefs.
Click to expand...
Or something in your words was involuntarily convincing to her, it provided perspective she had never been exposed to before.
 
moralorel said:
Yes. But what we choose is influenced by what we know and have experienced in life. Some people change their beliefs about certain matters when they are introduced to new experiences and information. Some people will stick to their beliefs no matter what they learn or experience.
Click to expand...
This is correct. In this way some people can be more easily convinced of new ideas than others. This is how minds are changed and is the basis of all persuasion.
But whether this happens is not a matter of choice. It's a matter of whether or not they find those ideas persuasive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top