WHEN SUPERSTITIOUS OR RELIGIOUS FAITH BECOMES A CONTROL BELIEF IT COLOURS ALL YOUR OUTLOOKS
A control belief controls and co-ordinates how you look at the evidence and how you interpret it.
It is inevitable that we will have control beliefs. The secret is to
stick to strictly necessary as in default beliefs. This unfortunately is
usually not what happens.
Believers in religious or political systems make up their minds and then they
interpret the evidence to fit their belief.
A control belief can be conscious or unconscious. You may not be aware of how
you treat something as probably true.
To avoid and minimise the damage and risks of control beliefs you need to know
what the default beliefs are. That helps work out why people are not settling
for these beliefs or sometimes are unaware of the need for the right defaults.
Belief is a head exercise where you tend to agree with something. A faith
position is when you honour somebody else by believing what they say. It is a
heart job for it is about connecting to another person as a person. Religion is
about faith.
We will look at religion as an example of a control faith.
FAITH
The default position is to assume that much of what is referred to as faith is
really not faith at all but self-deception. The fact that our control beliefs
always lead to self-deception proves that. Suppose my default position is
atheism. That affects the way I see the evidence - I see it as backing it up.
Even if it does back it up, I am still
We see people sacrificing a lot for their self-deception. Young people take
risks speeding because they feel they will live forever. Wives risk their health
and children to stay with abusive husbands for they have deceived themselves
into thinking it is not the men's fault and that the men love them and are eager
to change. We see more sacrifices for self-deception than for sensible faith.
Religionists tend to be more devoted to dodgy religious teachers than the boring
Vicar. So we should assume that self-deception is more common than faith. We
should assume the religionists are deceiving themselves.
We are weak vulnerable creatures. We tend to fool ourselves to cope with harsh
realities. So it should be assumed that a person is fooling themselves until
proven otherwise.
Religion is the biggest instance of self-deception. It is because it makes
people feel it is needed to keep them on the right path, it is because it offers
them a God who allegedly loves them, it is because it tells blatant lies like,
"We judge the sin not the sinner", it is because it promises damnation to those
who do not obey it, it is because it promises happiness in Heaven forever as a
carrot. It stands to reason that the thing that tries to satisfy our worst fears
will depend on people deceiving themselves more than anything else would. Clergy
and popes prey on vulnerability. Religion is keeping people away from truth. It
proves this when it condemns the default positions we have taken as sinful. It
seeks an unfair advantage and is manipulative.
In regard to religious faith, suppose a highly educated person such as Thomas
Aquinas or William Lane Craig believe in Christianity. Are they irrational for
believing such a nonsensical religion? Some say no. But if a religion is
nonsensical then it is up to the educated followers to prove that they are not
irrational. If they won't do it then we can make it our business to challenge
and expose them. You can be rationally wrong. But you can also be irrationally
wrong. If you are wrong it is likely that you are irrational as well. The
default position is that they are irrational.
If you claim that nonsense is true and are highly intelligent, you have an
obligation to prove to your listeners that you are not deliberately lying or
deceiving yourself.
If you embrace an extraordinary belief, that means you have to provide others
with extraordinary evidence for the truth of the belief before you can ask them
to accept it. This is to justify asking them to believe. You don't ask the world
to believe Saint Francis of Assisi was a woman without evidence. It's only fair.
The extraordinary nature of the belief demand extraordinary evidence. Also, your
extraordinary belief isn't the only one out there. We can't have everybody going
about with different extraordinary beliefs or we would have chaos. It would
encourage charlatans. Also to say your extraordinary belief is true while
somebody else's is wrong would be unjust and it would be arrogant and sectarian.
Also, if you claim to have an extraordinary belief you have to provide evidence
that you believe it. We are not speaking of providing evidence for the belief
being true but evidence that you accept the belief. For example, if you believe
that you really have two heads: one visible and the other undetectable then that
is mad. It would be extraordinary if you believed that.
HOLINESS
Holiness is a vice. It argues that one must be good for the sake of pleasing
God. But nobody can explain how it can be God's business what we do?
Is good good because God commands it? Then it would be good if he asked us to
sacrifice children.
Is good good whether God commands it or not? Then what do you need God for? What
business has he commanding good? Commanding is always an attempt to compel a
person to do something. We should do good spontaneously.
Some say that neither the above are correct for
The default position is that we help others for human reasons and keep religion
and God out of it. Help the dying beggar man yes. But don't waste any of your
motivation on the thought that you must do it for God or any of it for God. That
is giving something to a being who cannot be proven when it could be given to
the person you are helping. Waste no love on God.
ALTRUISTS OR EGOISTS?
Here is an argument I give without comment that the main reason we do anything
we do is that it serves us in some way. It says that we do everything we do
mainly for ourselves. You may call it predominant egoism. We at least expect
some return for everything we do even if it is a little bit of a good feeling.
"When I act and take a sweet, I take the sweet because I want to use my will and
I want to have the sweet. There are two motivations not one. The I wants show it
is me who I have at the centre. The wanting is the same if I want to use my will
for YOU to have the sweet. I want to will and I want you to have it. The sweet
for myself is not selfish because I have it but because I want it. Therefore if
I want you to be happy that is selfish too! But in a good way!
FREE WILL
The default position is that we do not have it. We are programmed by our past
which makes us feel we do things freely. Our past is part of us and we think we
own it and that gives us the feeling that we are free. But whatever we feel, we
do not have free will.
Why can't agnosticism about free will be the default? Why can't we say we have
no way of knowing if we have it or not? But we have no reason for thinking we
have it.
The main attraction about believing in free will is that it seems to justify
rewards and punishments. It is true that one should be punished for having done
wrong but it is not as simple as that. One can't go back and undo it. Once it is
done one can't help it any more. Punishment is unjust because you don't have the
power to make what has happened not to have happened.
THE AFTERLIFE
The default position is to assume that there is no life after death. It looks as
if death is the end and that is enough for us.
BELIEF IN MIRACLES
A miracle is an event that cannot be explained by anything natural. It is
supernatural. We have to assume something in relation to miracles happening.
1 We may assume that they can happen.
2 We may assume that they cannot happen.
3 We can say we can assume neither.
4 We might assume that they can happen but don't.
Four options. One option says they are believable. The other three says they are
not. So being outnumbered, the default position is that miracles are not
believable. Taking any other position is biased and unfair.
INTERPRETING MIRACLES
Even if we think miracles can happen, the problem then is how do we know if an
event really is a miracle? We can assume that it is a miracle. We can assume
that it is possible that it is a miracle. We can assume that there may be
unknown natural laws that can explain it meaning it is not a miracle. We can
assume that the witnesses are mistaken or misled.
The default position here is that the miracle presumption is outnumbered so the
default position is that we should not accept an event as a miracle. So we will
assume that we can never know if a reported miracle really was a miracle. Maybe
it was but that is not the point.
A miracle has to be unlikely or improbable - by definition. If it is routine for
statues to come to life, then it is not a miracle or wonder anymore. If we had
nothing but sunshine since the world began a shower of rain would be a miracle.
So we should be sceptical.
The burden of proof is on the believers who assert that a miracle has happened.
As human nature tends to doubt such claims in general they need to show that
they really believe. Too many pretend to believe in religion and different
trends. Sometimes a miracle claim is so big and crazy that you cannot be
expected to take their word for it that they believe.
You then have to remind them that they cannot just assert that a miracle has happened without trying to give suitable evidence. People must be the disciples of evidence and let it speak and be its intrument. Anything else is about trying to get the other person to agree with YOU not with the TRUTH.
They have a duty to show us that the miracle happened. And they have a duty to show that it must have been a miracle. It is hard to resist the realisation that there are more important things in life than worrying about verifying miracles. Go and help out in the soup kitchen and don't degrade yourself and others by wasting time on signs and wonders. If you disagree then you show your own arrogance and your crave for religious excitement. I would suggest that believers make claims that need testing and if they are wasting our time that is their fault not ours. A doctor could be helping children and if she has to deal with hypochondriacs all the time the fault is with them.
Is the burden to provide evidence or proof if possible always on the person who says x is true? Take this person as person a. Yes as long as we remember that the person b contradicting person a who makes a claim that something is true is also making a claim. A burden of proof or evidence is taken by person b when that person claims that the claim made by a is untrue. A negative claim is as much a claim as an affirmative one.
If the person has no proof or evidence the person must stay silent.
Also, if you say, “I claim there is a God and he has possibly raised Jesus,” and you are lying and are in fact an unbeliever, you are being dishonest. You are giving permission tp others to claim the opposite. That gives them the invitation to provide evidence and proof that you are wrong. That is unfair and is cheating when you don’t in fact believe. You are trying to get others to waste their time over you. If they expressly claim you are wrong then they have a duty to provide evidence and proof so there is more than an invitation going on. That is worse.
Believers usually present evidence for miracles that no sane person would take
seriously. If faith depends on cheating others then it is self-defeating
self-delusion and harmful posturing.
Christians believe that God miraculously wrote the gospels through men. If he
did, then why didn't he get them written down a few months after the alleged
events? The further away from the events an account is written the less credence
we can lend it. The gospels contain loads of miracle stories - you need very
good evidence that miracles happened. The gospels appeared decades after Jesus
died and therefore cannot count as good evidence.
Some liberal Christians instead of saying, "Jesus rose from the dead", may say,
"It is possible that Jesus rose from the dead." So they speak of miracles as
possible but not of miracles as having happened. But if you can base a religion
and hopes on possible miracles then you end up having no reality check and
gullible is the only word to describe you. There is no way the Mormon who says
it is possible that God revealed the Book of Mormon to the Prophet Joseph Smith
can be refuted. There is no way to show the man who writes a Bible that he
thinks aliens inspired him to write and which says Smith was a nut and a fake is
wrong. The end result is a faith that looks like it cares about reason and truth
but which is really just a manifestation of fundamentalism. It is fundamentalism
masquerading as good sense.
Liberals and Roman Catholics incidentally make little effort to keep the most
vulnerable and silly members of their flocks away from miracle mongers and
charlatans.
No matter how strong the evidence is for a miracle, it still only shows at best
that the miracle was possible not that it actually happened.
RELIGION
The default position is that we should be secular not religious. All that
matters is acting like a caring God to others instead of caring if God exists or
not. If God does not exist we must be him.
Finally, we need our defaults. We only want other beliefs. That is why control
belief and faith mechanisms are inherently oppressive.
