Why do I have to believe in....

@philokalia said
Or are these views different?

If I genuinely believe - in my "gut"- that my deceased mother sits in my home watching over me and my family and protecting us with her constant and real presence, I cannot make a decision to simply stop believing it.

What can happen though, is that after a period of time, which may be some years or it maybe a few hours or minutes, I can realize that I don't believe she is present anymore.

If I believe she has died and is gone and does not exist and cannot be present, I cannot make a decision to believe that she is present.

However, it's perfectly possible that I might one day realize that my "gut feeling" is convinced that she is actually there sitting in my house.

@fmf said
I am talking about beliefs about supernatural beings and phenomena. Specifically. That's why your thing about belief-in-people-using-boats seemed so inane.

@fmf said
If someone's racist or a sexist beliefs are all intertwined with their religious beliefs pertaining to God, immortality, "sin" and so on, then I don't see how they will be able to make a conscious decision not to have that "gut feeling".

If their racist or a sexist beliefs are inseparably linked to their belief in the supernatural, I think there can only be a process leading ...[text shortened]... their supernatural beliefs and whatever beliefs came with the psychological, "gut feeling" package.

The human brain fires differently when dealing with people outside of one's own race, according to new research out of the University of Toronto Scarborough.

"The so-called mirror-neuron-system is thought to be an important building block for empathy by allowing people to 'mirror' other people's actions and emotions; our research indicates that this basic building block is less reactive to people who belong to a different race than you," says Inzlicht.

Some of the most compelling evidence for a hard-wired racial divide concerns a brain region called the amygdala, which plays a central role in processing fear and aggression. If you were put in a brain scanner that identifies levels of activity in different regions and shown a picture of something scary, your amygdala would leap into action, telling your heart to race and your skin to get clammy.
...
So how does race enter into this picture? Numerous studies have found that if you put someone in a brain scanner and show him brief flashes (one-20th of a second) of emotionally neutral faces, the amygdala activates if the face is someone of a different race.

Now consider a brain region called the fusiform cortex, which specializes in detecting faces. Work by John Gabrieli at MIT shows that the fusiform isn’t as active when viewing the face of someone of another race. It’s not about novelty: Show a face with bright purple skin and there isn’t that blunting of the fusiform response. Other studies have shown that brain regions involved in empathy are more active when seeing a needle poking a finger with your own skin color than one of another race.

All this plays out behaviorally too. In work by Joshua Correll at the University of Colorado, volunteers played a video game in which they rapidly saw pictures of people holding either a gun or a cellphone, with the instruction to shoot only those with guns. When white participants (including police officers) were shown an African American, they tended to shoot faster and were more likely to mistake a cellphone for a gun.

@philokalia said
I just felt a need to talk about the limitations of what we can believe or choose to deny.

@philokalia said
Essentially, plenty of people just have these gut feelings they cannot easily overcome, and perhaps never can overcome.

@philokalia said
If someone cannot help whether or not they beleive in God... they also certainly cannot be expected to help whether or not they believe in racial or sexual equality, or dozens of other things, yes?

Personally, though, I still believe we have free will, and we are responsible for what we believe.

@philokalia said
Personally, though, I still believe we have free will, and we are responsible for what we believe.

@philokalia said
I just felt a need to talk about the limitations of what we can believe or choose to deny.

@fmf said
I haven't said we don't have free will. I haven't said we are not responsible for what we believe, especially if we espouse it to others and/or act upon it.

@philokalia said
Then we must have very different ideas of what really constitutes free will.

If we cannot choose to believe or disbelieve in God, in what sense would we have free will?

Our choice of desert?

@fmf said
No amount of free will can enable someone to decide to believe something supernatural that their gut tells them is not credible. No amount of free will in the world.

Can you exercise your free will to decide to stop believing in Jesus, for example? No. Does your free will enable you to believe in Hindu gods for just three weeks? No.

This does not mean, if you - say - deci ...[text shortened]... Hindu gods a chance, that you might not at some point you might realize that you do believe in them.

@philokalia said

You also forget that belief in God is not dependent on a gut feeling.

@philokalia said
You also forget that [i]belief in God is not dependent on a gut feeling.

I'm pretty sure a neutral observer of our exchanges would think you are always running away from genuine engagement.