You Can Believe What Is Untrue and Disbelieve What Is True

Mary Ann tweeted a link that led to a fascinating site about faith, belief, and scientific thought. For Richard Dawkins "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence".




This is an argument that has to swim against a tide of thought that argues that to have faith is good because of the very fact that it is irrational. Well someone clever came up with that dead end rebuttal. I fear lack of open mindedness. I fear ideas that are resist counter evidence. I fear dogma. Reading on from the link that Mary Ann posted I thought the following quote from Craig Lee Duckett was worth posting.

"Beliefs oftentime give the appearance of pleasure and peace, because beliefs are almost always personalsubjective and don't push back. People typically believe in those things that make them happy, alleviate their fears, give them hope, and promise to fulfill their wishes and dreams. Life-after-death, living in eternal Paradise with your loved ones, seventy-two virgins, inheriting a vibrant young 'spiritual' body, all knowledge revealed, seeing wicked people get theirs'—these are just some of the things that motivatetempting, the endings neat and tidy. Seeking truth and knowledge, on the other hand, typically produces the opposite effect by eventually uncovering the self-deception and denial underlying most untested belief systems "