Skip to main content

Believing is Seeing

By WizenedSage ~

Christians often say that one must be “open” to the message in order to get it. As Shelovesdcfc said on these pages recently, “That's the thing, you all want visual proof. Just have faith!" She seems to be saying that you, too, can believe . . . if you’ll just believe. Now that sounds like a rather useless truism to me. She might as well have said, “First you have to believe, and then you won’t need any proof,” or even, “Your belief IS the proof.” Isn’t this just turning wishful thinking into an article of faith?

362/365 UrielImage by SheriffAutlan via Flickr
In the bible, Jesus appears to be of the same mind when he says, “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” (John 20:29) He clearly intends for us to just believe, and never mind the evidence. He apparently confirms this, and even goes beyond it, when he says, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.” (Mark 9:23) Here, he seems to be saying that once one can make that jump to belief, then one becomes special, with special powers.

Psychologists have written volumes on the observation that what one believes strongly influences what one sees and feels. Religious people’s near death experiences (NDE) will tend to contain religious motifs, including encounters with religious figures and a mystical or divine presence. Prayer has placebo effects on the religious, producing that “warm inner glow.” And, only the religious believe in, and sometimes even “see,” (in dark shadows and fortuitous events) saints, angels, and miracles.

We freethinkers and skeptics often say, “Seeing is believing.” Christians appear to be saying, “Believing is seeing.” Further, the religious often use this “predisposition” bias purposely in church services when they work themselves into an emotional frenzy in order to “feel” the presence of god or Jesus. This only works, of course, if one believes. It appears to the faithful that believing makes it happen

All of this suggests that Christians have it backwards, putting the cart before the horse. We freethinkers and skeptics often say, “Seeing is believing.” Christians appear to be saying, “Believing is seeing.” That is, once you believe, you will see all the proofs and connections you need. This should make us very, very suspicious. In science, we can test or experiment and see the truth of a theory whether we are inclined to believe it or not. Our preconceptions don’t matter. What is, IS, and it doesn’t matter what we think. Scientists don’t meet every Sunday morning to join hands and sing, “Gravity is real, that’s the deal. The world is round, and what goes up must come down.”

The Christian will say that he knows god is real because he feels His presence within himself. The problem here is that I, and millions of others, don’t feel that presence. Now, isn’t it obvious that if a given test leads to contrary conclusions, depending on who is using that test, then the test itself is useless? Doesn’t this suggest pretty strongly that the Christian is merely tapping into, or manufacturing, his own “warm inner glow” that has nothing to do with external reality?

As DRC put it, in “Letter To My Family Part 1: Prayer” (12/10/10):
“… personal experience is highly prone to error. If the reader doesn’t believe this, they should research topics such as the placebo effect, attitude polarization, choice blindness, suggestibility, hindsight bias, confirmation bias, persistence of discredited beliefs, and preference for early information.”

All of these topics deal with errors in thinking caused by our internal biases. In all of them, the answers we get depend on our biases, on what we are thinking or feeling as we test a proposition. In short, our feelings are error prone and can lead us to false conclusions in many ways.

Here’s the short form of my argument. If you think that your belief IS the proof, that what you feel makes it so, then you are just kidding yourself. Either what you believe has a PROVEN connection with the external world or you are just accepting an unverified assumption. This is an obvious and extremely important point, and I want Christian readers to read that again and think about it, so I’ll say it again:

Either what you believe has a PROVEN connection with the external world or you are just accepting an unverified assumption.

Now, if that’s good enough for you, if you can accept a world where believing is seeing, then so be it. After all, it’s your life and you have every right to continue to fool yourself along.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

The Blame Game or Shit Happens

By Webmdave ~ A relative suffering from Type 1 diabetes was recently hospitalized for an emergency amputation. The physicians hoped to halt the spread of septic gangrene seeping from an incurable foot wound. Naturally, family and friends were very concerned. His wife was especially concerned. She bemoaned, “I just don’t want this (the advanced sepsis and the resultant amputation) to be my fault.” It may be that this couple didn’t fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. It may be that their choice of treatment was less than ideal. Perhaps their home diabetes maintenance was inconsistent. Some Christians I know might say the culprit was a lack of spiritual faith. Others would credit it all to God’s mysterious will. Surely there is someone or something to blame. Someone to whom to ascribe credit. Isn’t there? A few days after the operation, I was talking to a man who had family members who had suffered similar diabetic experiences. Some of those also suffered ea

Reasons for my disbelief

By Rebekah ~ T here are many layers to the reasons for my disbelief, most of which I haven't even touched on here... When I think of Evangelical Christianity, two concepts come to mind: intense psychological traps, and the danger of glossing over and missing a true appreciation for the one life we know that we have. I am actually agnostic when it comes to a being who set creation in motion and remains separated from us in a different realm. If there is a deistic God, then he/she doesn't particularly care if I believe in them, so I won't force belief and instead I will focus on this one life that I know I have, with the people I can see and feel. But I do have a lot of experience with the ideas of God put forth by Evangelical Christianity, and am confident it isn't true. If it's the case god has indeed created both a physical and a heavenly spiritual realm, then why did God even need to create a physical realm? If the point of its existence is to evolve to pas

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two