I ran across a tract from the Jehovah Witnesses awhile back and it made me realize that I am losing my perspective. I can no longer get into the head space I once occupied as a Mormon. I can no longer imagine how I blindly believed that the Bible was the truth and that it contained the instructions on how to live a good life. I am so jaded, hostile, and skeptical.

Why do people believe in scriptures such as the Bible, Quran, and Rig Veda?

It is different than believing in a cookbook or do-it-yourself plumbing repair manual. Those books are written by people and you know from the start that they are written by people with no gods involved. If the cookbook has good recipes that turn out well and taste good, it is a useful book. If the plumbing book gives good advice on how to successfully repair your bathroom fixtures, then it is useful.

But why do people so generally believe that scriptures come from gods? Beliefs like this are very widespread even in this age of technology.

"Scriptures" relieve them of the responsibility to learn and think. With "scriptures," they can just follow, and leave the thinking to others.

It's the lazy way to live...but very popular.

Apes in a cage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-NqKql6t8k

Because mom and dad and grandma and grandpa and aunti and uncle and best friends do and when they.....

believe too, then they receive hugs, smiles, gifts and the assurance that this is the best way to live life and they are not alone.

Yeah, a whole lot of this is tradition, literally tied to mother's breast. Very primal in that sense.

I know of some who do it for housing.

We make sense of our lives with stories. When you find a group of people you can live with who center themselves around a common story that inspires you it feels really good.

Fear and guilt and believing what some shyster preaches from a pulpit.

RB

she said.

I was four, and had told mom my naughty plan, which I hadn't understood to be naughty, but that was all it took to freeze in my tracks.

My underdstanding of Jesus at that point was that he was the one in the middle, assembling babies like Barbie dolls, because "babies come from heaven."

Jesus watched me for the better part of my life, but the only tangible thing I had of him was the bible.

The bible no longer qualifies as being tangible evidence. Clearly.

Because without the scriptures as proof, which of course really aren't proof, the believers have no proof, and deep down they want the proof, so you know they're right, because their scriptures say they're right, and that they're going to heaven and YOU AREN"T.

So when you don't accept their scriptures as proof, they know for sure that you are wrong, because they know they are right because they have the scriptures.

I have to go lay down now. My head hurts.

Exactly. It gives them security and a sense of moral superiority. Those things together let even the most hollow people imagine themselves to be a part of the most special and elite group.

Because we have to believe in something.

The teachings of a religion or a great humanist philosopher?

matt Wrote:
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> Because we have to believe in something.

No, frankly, we don't. Perhaps YOU do, but I wouldn't assume EVERYONE does -- they don't.

I used to believe what my parents believed, but that's because I wasn't yet able to read.

Once I read the bible I stopped believing in it. It only makes sense as literature, the story of a tribe that needed certain restrictive rules about how to act and what to wear, as overt indications that you were one of the tribe. It is a story of survival in a hostile world. It is not a guidebook for anything else.

So, I can't answer your question because I don't believe in that book. But my suspicion is that those who believe it is the word of god have actually never read it, and prefer to have it preached to them by some spittle-mouthed sociopath. This seems to make them feel better about themselves.

Enjoyable posts!

I think that many people just haven't caught up to the times. The age of information should be the harbinger of the loss of religion for most, or a morphing of religion into more reasonable ideas. I often ask people who tell me they know God wants me to..... or that Noah's flood was real, "don't you have a good internet connection yet."

I mean, how do you not look that important stuff up?

It took a long time for the masses in society to give up ideas such as the Earth as flat & the center of the universe. Even after most educated, enlightened thinkers had figured it out and more people gained access to information to learn of the natural world, masses held on to myths and so did their conservative leaders.
Perhaps the next few generations will shun religeon in its current form, at least.

There is no other rational explanation other than THAT IS WHAT PEOPLE WERE RAISED TO BELIEVE.

And why don't people change their belief in these things after it has been shown to be illogical? Because if people become EMOTIONALLY invested in an idea, they are NOT INTERESTED IN THE TRUTH.

That is the simple fact for most human beings. THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED IN TRUTH. Most people are ONLY interested in what support their emotionally invested biases. Fuck anything that goes against your emotions!!

It could be an early version of "It must be true: it's on the Internet". People eventually caught on to the Internet. Maybe they'll catch onto the bible too.

Sometimes I wonder why I should value the ancient stories of a middle eastern people over the ancient stories of my own people.

Because it tells you to believe it. And it's unquestionable because it came from god. And we know it came from god because it says it does, so there. /sarc

Because they like believing in fairy tales!???

Willful suspension of disbelief, and/or ignorance of the books contents altogether.


HH =)

I got into an interesting discussion with my Dad over the past few days about Evolution. It's clear that he was still holding onto the stories in the Bible just because he has since he was a boy.

I gave him a brief review about what Evolution is and what it isn't and I think he looked up some things while I was at work. He's understanding now why Evolution is real and is questioning the stories in the Bible for the first time. He's 85. I told him how I'd previously simply dismissed it because I'd been taught that it wasn't real and that God would explain it all to us one day.

I talked to him about how people just parrot things they've heard. I went through some of the standard canned answers that people give. "What about the Cambrian Explosion? It proves Evolution is wrong." "Yeah, look it up. It didn't exactly happen overnight."

"Well carbon dating is all wrong." "Yeah, look that up too. There are much more accurate ways of measuring the age of things now. They could be off by 50,000 years, but not necessarily millions of years."

"Well there are still apes. Well what about the missing link?" "Which one. There are many of them." "Oh."

I explained to my Dad how they just keep parroting the answers that they hear and the same canned answers just get passed around. I said, "But they're always woefully behind on the latest findings. You have to tell them to read about it, which they don't do, because they're already set in their answers and just believe what they hear."

I told him that I used to be like that myself and he said, "Well, you're thinking now." I laughed and said, "Yeah and studying what I'd previously dismissed."

He's getting it now and he's studying. He's finding it all very interesting, which is good. It keeps the mind sharp.

It's all in what you've been taught and often it also has to do with the fact that people don't study things they've been told to dismiss and so they simply dismiss them too.

I know I find that with my still church-going friends. "Oh, I don't need to study that. I know that it's not real and if it is, then God will explain it to us some day. I'm not worried about it."

They don't care. They're not interested. I know that I certainly wasn't in the past either. It's not important to them at all. They've already been handed all of the answers and they've got nothing to worry about, as far as they're concerned.

Greyfort Wrote:
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> I got into an interesting discussion with my Dad
> over the past few days about Evolution. It's
> clear that he was still holding onto the stories
> in the Bible just because he has since he was a
> boy.

If I could suggest a good read, get him "The Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins. It lays out what we do and don't know about our evolutionary history better than almost any other book I've seen.

It's never too late to learn, as your dad shows! :)

When you are taught something at a very young age it is very difficult to unlearn what you were taught to think is fact.

Since most of religion has it's foundation on what will happen to you after you die and what cannot be tested, it's not like a cookbook or plumbing book. There is no safe way to test it's truth. Since we generally go to others we trust to get their opinion on the worth of things, family and friends who have been taught the same religion will give you the same dogma that you received growing up. It's not until someone else teaches you a different reality that you get a sense that your family and friends might be wrong.

It is the rare individual who can work his way out of the majority mindset by thinking it through independently. My hat is off to those of you who did it.

Dawkins compared it to a brain virus, to indoctrinate small children with biblical myth.

He went on to say that evolution favors the survival of children who trust, belive and obey their parents. "Don't go near the cliff edge, don't run into the street," etc. We are hard-wired to depend on our parents for good information.

Shame so many of them include the myths that were fed to them.