Do we choose what we believe?

[Tr43]

My input. The Bible teaches that faith and belief are a choice, but suggest that God initiated true belief. Belief is portrayed as conscious decision. Jesus says, If I tell you, you believe not. Luke 22:67. So belief is matter of individual choice.

However, Bible says true belief is a gift from God, Ephesians 1:13. Believers are sealed by God's Spirit. We either have faith or lack of faith.

Romans chapter 11:8. Some people have Spirit of slumber. We see why lack of faith. 1 Corinthians 2:10. Its through holy Spirit that hidden truths are revealed to those who seek the truth. But those who have Spirit of slumber won't comprehend deep truth of Gods word.
Its also spiritual discernment. To asertain difference between sound doctrine and traditions of men.

2:14. Natural man/woman can't understand anything of the things of God, without holy Spirit.

Answer is. Its gift from God. Ephesians 1:13. Holy Spirit.

 

[moralorel]

My input. The Bible teaches that faith and belief are a choice, but suggest that God initiated true belief. Belief is portrayed as conscious decision. Jesus says, If I tell you, you believe not. Luke 22:67. So belief is matter of individual choice.

However, Bible says true belief is a gift from God, Ephesians 1:13. Believers are sealed by God's Spirit. We either have faith or lack of faith.

Romans chapter 11:8. Some people have Spirit of slumber. We see why lack of faith. 1 Corinthians 2:10. Its through holy Spirit that hidden truths are revealed to those who seek the truth. But those who have Spirit of slumber won't comprehend deep truth of Gods word.
Its also spiritual discernment. To asertain difference between sound doctrine and traditions of men.

2:14. Natural man/woman can't understand anything of the things of God, without holy Spirit.

Answer is. Its gift from God. Ephesians 1:13. Holy Spirit.

Good points. Here are some more verses to consider. Obviously there is context to consider here, but I think they attest to your point.

Matthew 13:14-15​

“And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says: ‘Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, and seeing you will see and not perceive; for the hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, so that I should heal them.'”

2 Corinthians 4:4​

“Whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them.”

Isaiah 29:10​

“For the LORD has poured out on you the spirit of deep sleep, and has closed your eyes, namely, the prophets; and He has covered your heads, namely, the seers.”

John 12:40​

“He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, lest they should see with their eyes, lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, so that I should heal them.”

Ephesians 4:18​

“having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart”

Corinthians 2:14​

“But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned.”

2 Corinthians 4:4

"In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God."

​

 

[moralorel]

For those who don't think it's a choice, I'll just redirect you to this thread whenever I don't believe your argument. It's not my fault nor my choice to believe what you are telling me... or so I'm told.

 

[Longfellow]

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).

I've been thinking that the ground of the kind of morality that helps bring out the best in people, in society and in the world around us is a kind of love for all of nature including all people everyone. That's actually true by definition, because the kind of love that I mean is the kind that sees the best possibilities and wants to help bring them out.

 

[Longfellow]

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.

I think that my way of thinking about God is very similar to yours, but in different words. The God that interests me is the God of Abraham in the Bible, and I think of him as being a collection of metaphors, thinking of us and the word around us as being created by someone. That is not to say that there actually is no creator, whatever that might mean, just than anything useful that we can say about him is purely metaphorical.

 

[Longfellow]

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)

Early in my life I thought about how I could avoid being trapped in a way of thinking like I saw other people doing, and that was one way that I thought of: spending time with people who disagree with me, trying to see what could be true in their ways of thinking.

 

[Longfellow]

... whether belief arises is not under our control. It’s something we discover happening (or not happening) inside us — not something we can will into being.

And if that’s true, it has profound moral implications for any system that makes salvation, judgment, or moral standing contingent on what a person believes to be true.

Is there anywhere that you want to go with that? Where do you go from there, in your book?

 

[Aupmanyav]

2:14. Natural man/woman can't understand anything of the things of God, without holy Spirit.

They do not need to understand. Just need to live life as it comes to them.

 

[otherbrother]

I did see an article about this. I thought about sharing it on here but never got around to it. Thanks for mentioning it.

Does it suggest that consciousness might be a nonlocal sort of thing that energy-processing devices that might have something in common with the energy processing device we call our brain can channel. While “mind” seems a subjective reality, one might guess that it operates more like energy fields and flows than other “things” in life. Could energy, even the electric passing through a computer, be a gateway to mind and consciousness? Our bias is to think of a computer as a thing, but energy patterns such as electromagnetic fields may be a doorway to “mind” and consciousness? Could the computers tap into a store of non local information akin to God’s mind?
Or is it just a surface non-reflective representation of “deep thoughts?”

 

[otherbrother]

They do not need to understand. Just need to live life as it comes to them.

I was minding my isness while running today

The Bible teaches that faith and belief are a choice, but suggest that God initiated true belief. Belief is portrayed as conscious decision.

That aligns with the way I am using the word “belief.” Looks like another yes voter to me. But again, a matter of semantics when it comes to “belief.”

 

[otherbrother]

They do not need to understand. Just need to live life as it comes to them.

Yes, but only if open to the unknown or paramarthika within them, so there can be some depth and wholeness to how they interpret and react to what comes to them. Your nondual emphasis would promote such openness. The “Holy Spirit” would also circumvent the duality since it is a bridge between self and Divine Other (or True Self).

 

[Aupmanyav]

Yes, but only if open to the unknown or paramarthika within them, so there can be some depth and wholeness to how they interpret and react to what comes to them. Your nondual emphasis would promote such openness. The “Holy Spirit” would also circumvent the duality since it is a bridge between self and Divine Other (or True Self).

Paramarthika (absolute reality) is an option but not a necessity. People can live happily in Vyavaharika (pragmatic reality) even without understanding those things. Who but a few understand Paramarthika?

 

[Longfellow]

Paramarthika (absolute reality) is an option but not a necessity. People can live happily in Vyavaharika (pragmatic reality) even without understanding those things. Who but a few understand Paramarthika?

Maybe you mean, understanding it is not a necessity? A person doesn't need to understand it to be open to it.

 

[Aupmanyav]

Maybe you mean, understanding it is not a necessity? A person doesn't need to understand it to be open to it.

I mean that a person can live life happily without worrying about God, soul, heaven, hell, judgment, world peace, universal brotherhood, universal conscience and all other highfalutin things with just responsible humane actions.

 

[TheLightWithin]

Our beliefs about reality are formed from various criteria .. including what we prefer to believe.
It is not just a case of being convinced through logical argument .. the human mind is a lot
more complex .. we have likes and dislikes.

True, logical arguments are not the only method by which we take in information.
There's the accumulation of knowledge over time. There's direct observation. There's efforts to understand things that don't seem logical to us. There's emotional reasoning. There's emotional reactions to people or words or things. There are preferences, (i.e. "i refuse to believe in a god that does x") there's also the opposite, fears - some are inclined to believe the worst of everything including believing their worst fears are always going to come true.

 

[TheLightWithin]

I find that to be partially true. But I have experienced so many arguments to the contrary. Maybe a person believes in belief A. They say they will believe belief B if source C supports it. Source C does indeed support it. Now they change their mind and say they will believe in belief B only if source D supports it. They find that source D does support belief B. We get all the way through the alphabet and now they just resort to insults, passive aggressiveness, and a simple "whatever". This is being obstinate. It's being stubborn.

It's a well-documented psychological finding that most people will dig down and stick to their own beliefs when faced with evidence to the contrary. They will defend their beliefs even harder when faced with evidence to the contrary. This is their choice.

Sort of-ish.
Because it's hard to know people's exact thought content or how they process information, we're always on the outside looking in. Even really good social psychological studies can get around this just a little.

When we see someone die-hard to their beliefs, we can't always tell whether they really just don't see it (the corrected view) and remain baffled, OR whether they most likely DO see it but are angry or embarrassed and refuse to ACKNOWLEDGE the reality. This could lead to merely grumbling "whatever" and avoiding future embarrassment by not taking up the topic again OR trying to gaslight people "I always held the scientifically proven view it was YOU who were a flat earther" .... OR....Their dislike of the corrected view may be so intense that they look for any information they can to try to sustain their existing beliefs, hence weird conspiracy theories.

See, the conspiracy theories are necessary, NOT ONLY to serve people like flat earthers in an argument against rational people BUT to convince their own brain... because mere reality would force them to involuntarily accept reality. If reality is painful and they don't have a way to adjust to it emotionally, they have to do a lot of work to trick their brain into believing the flat earth theory or whatever, by feeding themselves bum information and/or bad rationalizations. This is needed because regular old information would reinforce the view they don't like... people have to work hard to trick their own brains, because an aspect of belief is involuntary. Our actions are voluntary, our beliefs really aren't.

 

[TheLightWithin]

So when a flat earther sees all the evidence to the contrary, it's not their fault? Place them on the ISS for a year and they still believe the Earth to be flat and it's not their fault they refuse to admit their belief is faulty? Do the words "ego", "stubborn" and "ignorant" have no meaning anymore?

If a flat earther were put up against the reality of being on the ISS they would have to process what they were seeing, and then we'd see how some people might try to double down, possibly to avoid the shame of admitting they were wrong even if deep down they know they are, or whether somehow they really cannot connect what they are seeing to reality. Or whether some would admit they were wrong as they could not and would not deny reality. Or whether they would say "I see it NOW you dingdongs but you never gave me the proof before" or whatever. I'd love to be the one to conduct the debriefing interview.

 

[TheLightWithin]

Well, maybe when you were younger, you were claiming it was not harmful..
..but you are not saying that now.

Or sometimes we know something is harmful but we really like it.
I am this way with sugar and caffeine and just food.

 

[TheLightWithin]

When I was younger, it was fashionable. Now I understand better. I must have smoked a Merc during the 67 years.

What's a Merc? Some kind of unit of measurement maybe?

 

[TheLightWithin]

3 The world is too complex to be understood. It's already logically impossible that all details are in our brain because our brain itself is only a tiny part of the world. Thinking and deciding needs a high degree of abstraction.

Your whole comment is so good, and this particular point is so good - it really explains what I recognize is true both of the world - this world that we know or sort-of know- and doubly or exponentially so of whatever may be true in the realm of G-d and the supernatural - hence I am convinced (involuntarily, I cannot see any reason to think otherwise) that nobody can really, truly, rationally, say they "know" the "truth" about any spiritual claim whatsoever. I know others will think differently, because somehow, for some reason, they think they can.