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Goodbye Jesus

The Idea That We "choose" Not To Believe


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....I certainly contend that there is objective truth that we interact with through our senses.  But at the end of the day, all that truth is irrelevant if it doesn't affect our lives in some way or another.  Usually, people need to know that their belief is objectively true, and I think this is where "the truth" factors in.  But it's not the only consideration......

Hey Bhim

 

Thanks for this. My whole life I have struggled with "truth", "what is truth?" and "what is true?" Due to my black-and-white approach to Christianity, I created a schism in my cognition that allowed for something to be true even though it didn't work (like God, miracles, prayer or religion). Turning away from my innate positivist sensibilities, I 'chose' instead to believe in things I considered 'true' even though they were irregular in their presentation and broke all rules of science. Not only that, but to assuage the resultant intense cognitive dissonance--being a positivist at heart--I constructed extensive cognitive frameworks to make sense of the senseless. I ventured out onto very thin intellectual ice and eventually, fell through. Gobbled up by the insanity of my baseless conjecture, I lost my faith and crawled back to science. 

 

Since deconverting--and I'm not sure it was a choice, as I felt driven to it--I cling to a positivist worldview that relies upon sensory input.

 

Anyhow, all this to say, I really appreciate your post on truth/what works. Food for thought for an ex-fundy-nutter! smile.png

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Goodbye Jesus

you are welcome to chose to see it in whatever manner works for you, LifeCycle.  

 

I stated my thoughts on the subject from my perspective and how I choose to see it.   You obviously disagree and are choosing to see it differently.  

 

I have no desire to argue with you about who is right or not. 

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My favorite example against free will and Christians is if they believe in free will I tell them, "Simple then, stop sinning."  GONZ9729CustomImage1539775.gif
 

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Stryper, you probably also believe you choose to be heterosexual... because you aren't gay so you can't imagine what it might be like to be gay. 

 

So... you think you can choose to believe, so that means everyone can. 

 

I didn't leave the faith, my faith left me. I wanted to believe, but all these pesky facts kept presenting themselves and kept contradicting the bible until I couldn't force myself to keep believing, no matter how much I wanted to. And I DID want to. I grew up in it, I believed fervently, my family are all Christians... it was terribly hard to leave. I didn't have any problem with living by the morality in the bible, so it wasn't a rebellion. It just didn't hold up as truth anymore. 

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Stryper, you probably also believe you choose to be heterosexual... because you aren't gay so you can't imagine what it might be like to be gay. 

 

So... you think you can choose to believe, so that means everyone can. 

 

I didn't leave the faith, my faith left me. I wanted to believe, but all these pesky facts kept presenting themselves and kept contradicting the bible until I couldn't force myself to keep believing, no matter how much I wanted to. And I DID want to. I grew up in it, I believed fervently, my family are all Christians... it was terribly hard to leave. I didn't have any problem with living by the morality in the bible, so it wasn't a rebellion. It just didn't hold up as truth anymore. 

That's the best way to phrase it in my opinion.  Once you start finding out why things don't add up, you lose faith.  It's not a conscience choice... You can just no longer believe it because it wouldn't make sense to do so.  Essentially, the new-found knowledge influenced the faith to depart from you.

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My model is that our beliefs are informal subjective probabilities and we make gambles (faith). Nobody believes 100% and nobody believe 0% on any question.

 

Of course our beliefs depend on our culture, upbringing, experiences, but we take actions by choice. And those actions feed back into our beliefs because they determine our future experiences. Maybe if I fasted and prayed enough I might see results and believe more. So it's kind of a choice IMO.

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Stryper, you probably also believe you choose to be heterosexual... because you aren't gay so you can't imagine what it might be like to be gay. 

 

So... you think you can choose to believe, so that means everyone can. 

 

I didn't leave the faith, my faith left me. I wanted to believe, but all these pesky facts kept presenting themselves and kept contradicting the bible until I couldn't force myself to keep believing, no matter how much I wanted to. And I DID want to. I grew up in it, I believed fervently, my family are all Christians... it was terribly hard to leave. I didn't have any problem with living by the morality in the bible, so it wasn't a rebellion. It just didn't hold up as truth anymore. 

 

I would view that as you chose to acknowledge that the facts existed.   You chose to not be delusional.   When it came down to following the facts or the faith, you chose the facts.

 

I can imagine what it is like to be gay.  Just as I can imagine what is was like to be a black person in the south in the '60's.  Just as I can imagine what it must be like to live in Japan.  

 

As to the specifics of choice and homosexuality, I think that choices are made in a developing psyche that are made so early in life that they would bear little difference from being genetic.  Having watched two kids of mine through age two,  there is A LOT going on in their heads that they simply can't communicate. 

 

I am not doubting your story.  I have no doubt that it was painfully hard to come out as atheist or ex-christian.  I tried to be the best christian I could.  It changed nothing.  When I accepted that I have control over my life, then things got better for me.  

 

As I said to LifeCycle, you choose to see it how best works for you.  I obviously see it differently.  

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I had a conversation with my mother awhile back that made me understand this topic a bit better. For her a belief in God is something she chooses because although there are many questions she can't answer she chooses to put them to one side and not look at them deeply and so she protects her belief. She knows the questions are there but she is afraid of the consequences if she examines them any further. She never mentioned rationality or evidence when talking about God, she used phrases like, "I find it comforting," and "the alternative is too depressing." and "it has a positive influence in my life." So for her it was about the experience rather than truly examining the facts and that's where the choice came in. If she never looks at the raw facts then she never has to face the possibility that it might not be true.

 

For me, with my personality, that was never a good option, I need to know and so I chose to keep asking those questions and chasing them down and I didn't let God off the hook. To the christians still on the believing side of things that looks like not trusting God whereas to us on the unbelieving side we see it as refusing to stick our head in the sand.

 

So, in a way it was a choice, just not one I could avoid making.

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     I think for a great many of us the choice was to finally acknowledge, and accept, the realization that there was no god.  Our unconscious mind had been working the problem and figured this out which was why we could feel our faith leaving us.  But we really did have to acknowledge that there was no god otherwise we could simply continue to compartmentalize the information and be empty shells mindlessly going to church and telling people that surely one does exist when questioned about it.

 

          mwc

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I had a conversation with my mother awhile back that made me understand this topic a bit better. For her a belief in God is something she chooses because although there are many questions she can't answer she chooses to put them to one side and not look at them deeply and so she protects her belief. She knows the questions are there but she is afraid of the consequences if she examines them any further. She never mentioned rationality or evidence when talking about God, she used phrases like, "I find it comforting," and "the alternative is too depressing." and "it has a positive influence in my life." So for her it was about the experience rather than truly examining the facts and that's where the choice came in. If she never looks at the raw facts then she never has to face the possibility that it might not be true.

 

For me, with my personality, that was never a good option, I need to know and so I chose to keep asking those questions and chasing them down and I didn't let God off the hook. To the christians still on the believing side of things that looks like not trusting God whereas to us on the unbelieving side we see it as refusing to stick our head in the sand.

 

So, in a way it was a choice, just not one I could avoid making.

I'm going to rate this as the most intelligent post in the thread.

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I had a conversation with my mother awhile back that made me understand this topic a bit better. For her a belief in God is something she chooses because although there are many questions she can't answer she chooses to put them to one side and not look at them deeply and so she protects her belief. She knows the questions are there but she is afraid of the consequences if she examines them any further. She never mentioned rationality or evidence when talking about God, she used phrases like, "I find it comforting," and "the alternative is too depressing." and "it has a positive influence in my life." So for her it was about the experience rather than truly examining the facts and that's where the choice came in. If she never looks at the raw facts then she never has to face the possibility that it might not be true.

 

For me, with my personality, that was never a good option, I need to know and so I chose to keep asking those questions and chasing them down and I didn't let God off the hook. To the christians still on the believing side of things that looks like not trusting God whereas to us on the unbelieving side we see it as refusing to stick our head in the sand.

 

So, in a way it was a choice, just not one I could avoid making.

I'm going to rate this as the most intelligent post in the thread.

 

 

Thanks!

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I recently had a few encounters with some Christian friends regarding this idea of a "choice" that I supposedly made to turn away from God/Jesus.  I have a very close friend who pastors a small rural church.  I hadn't been to a church in probably over a year, and I was visiting him and decided to stay for his church service.  During his sermon, he made reference multiple times to people (like me) who "choose" to not follow Jesus.  I think most of us on this forum remember countless sermons where we were basically told that people who didn't believe in God made a conscious choice to turn away from God.  When I was a believer, I used to agree with this, but I do admit I never gave the concept much thought or talked to any non-Christians about it. 

 

I also recently received an email from a family member and they also spoke of my choice not to believe that Jesus is the only way.  The email referenced this "choice" many times how I choose not to follow Jesus.

 

This past weekend, I had coffee with another close friend of mine who is also a Christian.  I was explaining my frustration to him about how Christians think I made some sort of choice about God, as if I had some sort of control on the matter.  While I consider this friend to be much less extreme than my other friends, he also thought I had made a choice in rejecting Jesus.  I tried the old Santa Clause analogy with him, by asking him if he could ever choose to believe in Santa Clause as an adult.  He said he couldn't believe in Santa Clause, but claimed it was still a choice, even though the evidence of Santa Clauses' non-existence was overwhelming.  I then thought that maybe the issue here was simply one of semantics or grammar.  Maybe I did make a choice in some sense of the word, and maybe I am simply being offended at the way people use the word choice.  But, I don't think so.

 

I bring up this topic because I think there is a large misconception that Christians have about people like me who no longer believe in God.  I have never felt more mis-understood about anything in my life than I do when it comes to the way my Christian friends and family think about me since I de-converted.  It's extremely frustrating.  Yet, I keep trying to bridge these gaps of misunderstanding and I cannot seem to make any difference in their minds.  I'd like to know what other ex-Christians think about this topic in particular.  Have any of you made any headway with Christians in trying to explain that we had no choice in the matter?  I had no choice in my disbelief, as the evidence simply changed my mind.  I could no longer choose to believe in God than I could to believe in Santa Clause or Zeus or the tooth fairy.  It is really out of my control.

 

Isn't a choice something you make when you have two options?  If Santa Clause isn't real, how is it an option to believe that he exists?  I don't think we have a choice in the matter.  Unless we are small children with parents who claim that Santa clause exists, we can't believe in him.  The evidence of his non-existence simply flies in the face of reality.  As for me (and probably most other people on this forum), belief in God is the same exact thing.  I cannot choose to believe in God...my mind won't allow for that choice because I don't see any evidence.  How then can I be accused of making a choice?

 

This notion of choice is often accompanied by the idea that I still know deep in my heart the reality of God/Jesus' existence.  As if I willfully and knowingly reject him.  That would imply I think God is real.  I do not think this, but Christians are convinced that this is the case for everyone who doesn't believe. 

 

This misunderstanding might be a key to trying to bridge the gap between believers and non-believers.  I haven't made any headway with my Christian friends and family, but I would love to hear from others about their thoughts and experiences with this particular issue.

 

You have chosen not to be an idiot that babbles the same crap as all other christbots.  I think part of the problem here is that a Christian presumes the existence of God which to them means you have made a choice to reject God. You, on the other hand understand that God is a myth so there is no choice to make. You cannot reject or accept that which does not exist.

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Stryper, you probably also believe you choose to be heterosexual... because you aren't gay so you can't imagine what it might be like to be gay. 

 

So... you think you can choose to believe, so that means everyone can. 

 

I didn't leave the faith, my faith left me. I wanted to believe, but all these pesky facts kept presenting themselves and kept contradicting the bible until I couldn't force myself to keep believing, no matter how much I wanted to. And I DID want to. I grew up in it, I believed fervently, my family are all Christians... it was terribly hard to leave. I didn't have any problem with living by the morality in the bible, so it wasn't a rebellion. It just didn't hold up as truth anymore. 

 

I would view that as you chose to acknowledge that the facts existed.   You chose to not be delusional.   When it came down to following the facts or the faith, you chose the facts.

 

I can imagine what it is like to be gay.  Just as I can imagine what is was like to be a black person in the south in the '60's.  Just as I can imagine what it must be like to live in Japan.  

 

As to the specifics of choice and homosexuality, I think that choices are made in a developing psyche that are made so early in life that they would bear little difference from being genetic.  Having watched two kids of mine through age two,  there is A LOT going on in their heads that they simply can't communicate. 

 

I am not doubting your story.  I have no doubt that it was painfully hard to come out as atheist or ex-christian.  I tried to be the best christian I could.  It changed nothing.  When I accepted that I have control over my life, then things got better for me.  

 

As I said to LifeCycle, you choose to see it how best works for you.  I obviously see it differently.  

 

 

 

Having suffered from major depression for several years, I was initially inclined to disagree with your posts (I did and still do to a degree, agree more with LifeCycle's posts when reading through the thread). But this sentence did stand out to me. I guess that's one thing I always have trouble with. It's hard for me to realize and accept that I was always in control but thought someone else was and was trusting this other person to guide me.  I never really felt in control ever between all the religion and very strict parents and sometimes I still feel like I'm not. It reminded me in therapy, I was taught that you can choose different actions based on the information and feelings/thoughts you have, so I suppose I can see how all things can be considered a choice.  Though, it was definitely never my choice to become that depressed in the first place. Arguably, a lot of actions taken mixed with genetics that made me more susceptible to the condition (along with my OCD), so I guess if I had chosen other actions, I'd have had a different outcome. But I had no way of knowing exactly what the outcome would be until it's already happened. (if that makes sense)  

 

Anyway, not trying to argue (I actually really dislike that), but I do like learning new things and discussing stuff I'm honestly interested in. I was taught for a very long time that life was nothing but choices and when I was depressed, my family was frustrated and so was I and still am sometimes. Maybe my thoughts and views have just always been wrong and not just in regards to religion. 

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It is complicated.

 

Christianity starts with self-delusion.  If order to become a Christian (or fall for most scams) you must choose to suspend disbelief and accept a set of assumptions that the conman or fundamentalist gives you.  When you take that plunge into Christianity you are given a set of rules that must become your core beliefs - beliefs upon which you order all the other beliefs you hold about reality.  This leads to further self-delusion.  So Christians are right that choice is involved.  However there is a limit to self-delusion.  Christians are constantly getting doubts.  They may read a Bible verse that indicates a contradiction with reality, another Bible passage or Christianity.  Or they explore a thought that indicated the whole thing is a house of cards.  Or they watch a religions leader act like a selfish criminal that knows it's all a scam.  When these things happen the Christian is faced with a choice.  If they look to the religion maybe they can delude themselves into white washing the incident.  They might find some way to rationalize it.  But self delusion is a skill and sometimes the job wasn't done well enough to meet the challenge.  So choice can only go so far.  There are a few people who bounce back and forth from ex-Christianity to Christianity.  It does happen.  I think the strength of the self-delusion varies from person to person and depends on many things.  Clearly some people do reach the point where the illusion is broken and cannot be repaired.  People who reach that point cannot go back to religion no matter what because they have had the realization mentioned above by other posters.

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Hey Bhim

 

 

Thanks for this. My whole life I have struggled with "truth", "what is truth?" and "what is true?" Due to my black-and-white approach to Christianity, I created a schism in my cognition that allowed for something to be true even though it didn't work (like God, miracles, prayer or religion). Turning away from my innate positivist sensibilities, I 'chose' instead to believe in things I considered 'true' even though they were irregular in their presentation and broke all rules of science. Not only that, but to assuage the resultant intense cognitive dissonance--being a positivist at heart--I constructed extensive cognitive frameworks to make sense of the senseless. I ventured out onto very thin intellectual ice and eventually, fell through. Gobbled up by the insanity of my baseless conjecture, I lost my faith and crawled back to science. 

 

Since deconverting--and I'm not sure it was a choice, as I felt driven to it--I cling to a positivist worldview that relies upon sensory input.

 

Anyhow, all this to say, I really appreciate your post on truth/what works. Food for thought for an ex-fundy-nutter! smile.png

 

 

I'm glad you found my comments helpful, and I will add that I'm a fellow ex-fundy.  When going over my past emails and other online discussions with both Christians and non-Christians, it's sometimes hard to believe that I wrote the things I did.  There's definitely a time when Christianity appeared to be working for me.  That of course is no longer the case!

 

We seem to have delved into a discussion on determinism and free will.  Do we choose our own actions?  Specifically in this case: do we chose belief in Jesus?  Or are our actions determined by an external force, whether God or the laws of nature?  This is a debate that has carried on since time immemorial, and likely won't be resolved in an online discussion.  But like I said earlier, I know what works for me and what doesn't.  Belief that everyone I know save for a select few are going to eternal hell based on their choice of religious belief doesn't work.  Belief in the religion I was raised with, on the other hand, works quite nicely.  It certainly helps matters that arguments for the veracity of the Bible are intellectually poor.  But the fact is that if Christianity worked for me, I would believe it.  I find that Christians who attemt to convert/re-convert me do not address my specific concerns.  Instead of telling me why I should be a Christian, all I get is incorrect arguments for Biblical truth.

 

In any case, I'm glad you've left the religion that conflicts with your desire to be consistent with objective truth.

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I think we also have to define "choice" to make sure we actually agree on this definition. 

 

I don't think it's a "choice" if someone yells boo and I let out a surprised yelp. I didn't "choose" to have that reflex. It just came out. You could argue that my mind DID make that choice, but it happened so quickly I wasn't consciously aware of making that choice. But when something happens involuntarily, I wouldn't say it's a choice. At least, not a CONSCIOUS choice. 

 

While I was still a believer, my brain was holding "facts" that contradicted each other. All these "truths" couldn't be true at the same time. I felt like my brain was splitting apart. I started feeling a little crazy. I "believed" the bible, but I "knew" facts that contradicted it. I had nightmares, depression, and even some hallucinations. I think because I was trying so hard to deny reality, and my brain was trying to force me to unravel one or the other since the paradox was ruining my sanity. I kept trying NOT to make a choice between them though. I kept TRYING to have opposing facts somehow fit together and make sense. But my brain was busy sorting it out in some unconscious way, and as I was listening to pastors speaking, it just kept feeling wrong and untrue. I would feel nauseated when they'd say something ugly about homosexuality, harp on the inferiority of women or sinners or whatever. But still I kept trying to buy into it. Kept trying to make myself keep believing it. 

 

If acknowledging that something doesn't make sense when it stops making sense is a choice, then okay. But that's like splitting hairs, isn't it? It's like if you tell me something and I scrunch up my face and I say, "I don't understand." and you say, "No, you disagree with me." and I'm like, "No, really, I don't know what you mean--it literally isn't making sense." and you say, "You're just choosing not to get it." 

 

Such is this argument. The fact remains, I could not keep believing in Christianity. Period. Whether it was a choice or not is pretty irrelevant anyway, because my brain just stopped "getting it" and any Christian who insists it's a choice is doing so because it fits into the free will idea they hold as part of their ideology. I don't need to speak that language anymore. You don't either.

 

Maybe some people do make a conscious choice to stop believing. I can't speak for them on that. I only know that I didn't.  

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Yes, I'd agree that it's important to clarify this business of "choice."  But again, determinism and free will are topics which have been hotly debated for decades if not centuries, which is why I personally opt not to get too deeply involved in that discussion.

 

What I'm more interested in asking is: why is it important for Christians to believe that we chose to leave Jesus?  And why is it important for us to believe that we did not make an active choice to disbelieve?  When I was a Christian I was a Calvinist, and I believed that no one chooses belief in or rejection of Jesus, but that this is God's sovereign choice, and our active obedience is only possible by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  So the Christians from my former church, while utterly condemning me as a relapsed heathen, would say that God chose my reprobation, rather than I choosing to disbelieve.

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One can choose to pretend to believe something they know is false, but one can not actually believe in what he has concluded to be unbelievable.

 

This.  It's a choice between following the evidence, or lying to ourselves.

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I think we also have to define "choice" to make sure we actually agree on this definition. 

 

I don't think it's a "choice" if someone yells boo and I let out a surprised yelp. I didn't "choose" to have that reflex. It just came out. You could argue that my mind DID make that choice, but it happened so quickly I wasn't consciously aware of making that choice. But when something happens involuntarily, I wouldn't say it's a choice. At least, not a CONSCIOUS choice. 

 

While I was still a believer, my brain was holding "facts" that contradicted each other. All these "truths" couldn't be true at the same time. I felt like my brain was splitting apart. I started feeling a little crazy. I "believed" the bible, but I "knew" facts that contradicted it. I had nightmares, depression, and even some hallucinations. I think because I was trying so hard to deny reality, and my brain was trying to force me to unravel one or the other since the paradox was ruining my sanity. I kept trying NOT to make a choice between them though. I kept TRYING to have opposing facts somehow fit together and make sense. But my brain was busy sorting it out in some unconscious way, and as I was listening to pastors speaking, it just kept feeling wrong and untrue. I would feel nauseated when they'd say something ugly about homosexuality, harp on the inferiority of women or sinners or whatever. But still I kept trying to buy into it. Kept trying to make myself keep believing it. 

 

If acknowledging that something doesn't make sense when it stops making sense is a choice, then okay. But that's like splitting hairs, isn't it? It's like if you tell me something and I scrunch up my face and I say, "I don't understand." and you say, "No, you disagree with me." and I'm like, "No, really, I don't know what you mean--it literally isn't making sense." and you say, "You're just choosing not to get it." 

 

Such is this argument. The fact remains, I could not keep believing in Christianity. Period. Whether it was a choice or not is pretty irrelevant anyway, because my brain just stopped "getting it" and any Christian who insists it's a choice is doing so because it fits into the free will idea they hold as part of their ideology. I don't need to speak that language anymore. You don't either.

 

Maybe some people do make a conscious choice to stop believing. I can't speak for them on that. I only know that I didn't.  

 

 

I have not thought about instinctual reaction enough to form an opinion on it.   Honestly, I hadn't considered it before.   It is something I'll have to think about and bounce of people. 

 

You chose to not make a choice which is still a choice.  

 

Based on what you have said, I see it as you looked at the facts and you looked and the belief and you notice a contradiction.  So you choose to try and resolve the contradiction.  However, when it started becoming obvious that there was no resolution, you chose, by your own words, to not choose between them. You didn't choose to stop trying resolve the paradox. Eventually, you reached a breaking point and you chose to accept that the two things were not compatible.  So you chose to let go of the faith for the facts, because it appeared to be the only choice. 

 

You were active in all of this.  You actively chose to try and resolve the contradiction.  In doing so, you were choosing to wake up out of the sleep of religion. You could have chosen to go back to sleep and just accept everything they said.  You could have chosen to go to another church.  You could have chosen to go to another religion.  Those are just a few of the choices that I can see. However,  it appears from what you have said, those would not have been seen as choices. 

 

From what you have said, I see it as you took control of this aspect of your life.  In making choices in life, there are unintended or unexpected consequences. I don't think you expected that your choice to resolve the paradox would lead where it did.  Therefore, coming to this place of non-belief appears to be a non-choice.  This is a valid view.

 

I am trying to present a different view. I am doing my best to explain it the way I see it.  I try to get people to see that they do have choices in life.  That they can control their lives for the most part. 

 

This also has nothing to do with freewill theology, because there is no punishment for choosing "wrong" because there is no one to judge your choices but you.  Choose to believe or choose not to. It is all learning either way.

 

Does that help? 

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Yes, I'd agree that it's important to clarify this business of "choice."  But again, determinism and free will are topics which have been hotly debated for decades if not centuries, which is why I personally opt not to get too deeply involved in that discussion.

 

What I'm more interested in asking is: why is it important for Christians to believe that we chose to leave Jesus?  And why is it important for us to believe that we did not make an active choice to disbelieve?  When I was a Christian I was a Calvinist, and I believed that no one chooses belief in or rejection of Jesus, but that this is God's sovereign choice, and our active obedience is only possible by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  So the Christians from my former church, while utterly condemning me as a relapsed heathen, would say that God chose my reprobation, rather than I choosing to disbelieve.

 

If god chose then you have no freewill thus negating a basic premise of most christianity verison. We must come to god by choice so why could one not leave based on choice. That sort of cherry picking bs is a waste of time. Let them feel anyway they want to about you who gives a crap what a bunch of mislead weak minded needy assholes think about you leaving.

 

What about those of us who never believed did we not make a choice to?

 

I would rather be a heathen than a slave.

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My model is that our beliefs are informal subjective probabilities and we make gambles (faith). Nobody believes 100% and nobody believe 0% on any question.

 

Of course our beliefs depend on our culture, upbringing, experiences, but we take actions by choice. And those actions feed back into our beliefs because they determine our future experiences. Maybe if I fasted and prayed enough I might see results and believe more. So it's kind of a choice IMO.

 

You are making a gigantic assumption of what others think and how they act based on what? You are making a claim here that I see no way anyone could quantify in real life short of being able to actually read peoples minds.

 

Any choice any is a gamble. If you knew the outcome already there would be no need for choice you would simply take the action that would yield the future outcome you already had a guarantee of assuming said action was performed. As it is we live in a quantum universe that makes this impossible. You can fudge with the odds but there is no guarentee of anything that I am aware of. Even death and taxes cannot be proved to be the end result in 100% of all choices in all times.

 

It is not just the choices that you make that affect these interactions either. Maybe I missed the point of what you meant here but I feel a lot of people really rely on some strange logic to understand this type of issue. Calculated or not all things are choice. They may not always be your choice but they are someones. Even choosing to disagree with me is a choice that affects you. It is your right to make that choice but it still could affect outcomes that neither of us can forsee.

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And why is it important for us to believe that we did not make an active choice to disbelieve?

 

It's not a belief, but simply the way it is; once you know it's a sham you are simply unable to feign the religious belief any longer. The only importance of making this clear is so Christians have a more accurate picture of those who have seen through the religious claptrap.

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My model is that our beliefs are informal subjective probabilities and we make gambles (faith). Nobody believes 100% and nobody believe 0% on any question.

 

Of course our beliefs depend on our culture, upbringing, experiences, but we take actions by choice. And those actions feed back into our beliefs because they determine our future experiences. Maybe if I fasted and prayed enough I might see results and believe more. So it's kind of a choice IMO.

 

You are making a gigantic assumption of what others think and how they act based on what? You are making a claim here that I see no way anyone could quantify in real life short of being able to actually read peoples minds.

 

Any choice any is a gamble. If you knew the outcome already there would be no need for choice you would simply take the action that would yield the future outcome you already had a guarantee of assuming said action was performed. As it is we live in a quantum universe that makes this impossible. You can fudge with the odds but there is no guarentee of anything that I am aware of. Even death and taxes cannot be proved to be the end result in 100% of all choices in all times.

 

It is not just the choices that you make that affect these interactions either. Maybe I missed the point of what you meant here but I feel a lot of people really rely on some strange logic to understand this type of issue. Calculated or not all things are choice. They may not always be your choice but they are someones. Even choosing to disagree with me is a choice that affects you. It is your right to make that choice but it still could affect outcomes that neither of us can forsee.

Maybe an example is helpful.

 

After college I became an atheist, but I didn't believe 100% in atheism - it was more like: atheism 90%, Christianity but God hates me 9%, Christianity but God loves me 1%. So with those beliefs I decided to make choices as an atheist.

 

I could have chosen to go to church instead and maybe I would have started to believe more in Christianity as a result of that choice. I was an Episcopalian and belief wasn't all that important. You needed to believe enough to show up on Sunday.

 

The way some denominations base salvation on belief makes no sense to me, because nobody believes anything 100%.

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My model is that our beliefs are informal subjective probabilities and we make gambles (faith). Nobody believes 100% and nobody believe 0% on any question.

 

Of course our beliefs depend on our culture, upbringing, experiences, but we take actions by choice. And those actions feed back into our beliefs because they determine our future experiences. Maybe if I fasted and prayed enough I might see results and believe more. So it's kind of a choice IMO.

 

You are making a gigantic assumption of what others think and how they act based on what? You are making a claim here that I see no way anyone could quantify in real life short of being able to actually read peoples minds.

 

Any choice any is a gamble. If you knew the outcome already there would be no need for choice you would simply take the action that would yield the future outcome you already had a guarantee of assuming said action was performed. As it is we live in a quantum universe that makes this impossible. You can fudge with the odds but there is no guarentee of anything that I am aware of. Even death and taxes cannot be proved to be the end result in 100% of all choices in all times.

 

It is not just the choices that you make that affect these interactions either. Maybe I missed the point of what you meant here but I feel a lot of people really rely on some strange logic to understand this type of issue. Calculated or not all things are choice. They may not always be your choice but they are someones. Even choosing to disagree with me is a choice that affects you. It is your right to make that choice but it still could affect outcomes that neither of us can forsee.

Maybe an example is helpful.

 

After college I became an atheist, but I didn't believe 100% in atheism - it was more like: atheism 90%, Christianity but God hates me 9%, Christianity but God loves me 1%. So with those beliefs I decided to make choices as an atheist.

 

I could have chosen to go to church instead and maybe I would have started to believe more in Christianity as a result of that choice. I was an Episcopalian and belief wasn't all that important. You needed to believe enough to show up on Sunday.

 

The way some denominations base salvation on belief makes no sense to me, because nobody believes anything 100%.

 

 

You are drawing on your personal belief and life to say WE ALL are like you. Your personal experience does not equal fact. I see what you are saying but I believe 100% there is not god never was any never will be. Can you argue that with some sort of creditable data? Last time I checked my opion was just that...mine. Just as your is yours and you are mostly stating it here not fact.

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I'm still circling around the definition of choice. I wasn't inactive, no. I read books and talked to people and watched nature and science programs, but that wasn't necessarily with the goal of making a decision, but to inform myself about life and the world and to acquire knowledge. I was active in gaining knowledge that finally drowned my beliefs. 

 

Let's put it this way, would you say someone who died after a shipwreck because he was lost at sea that ultimately he chose to drown? After all, didn't he at some point quit treading water and choose to give up? He could've kept trying to swim, even after 10 days of no food or water or sleep, right? Or maybe his body just shut down from dehydration, muscle spasms, exhaustion, etc.

 

This is what happened to my faith. It drowned. I couldn't choose to keep it. It just stopped being real and nothing I could try to do to keep believing in it worked. I wasn't inactive. I tried to keep it. But my brain finally shut down and refused to hold it. 

 

And it's gone. I'm happy it's gone. The only credit I take for leaving Christianity is that I didn't choose to kill myself while I was going through my de-conversion. It turned out to be much happier here on the other side, but I didn't know that until I got here.  

 

Look, some people's brains can live in denial or hold paradoxical thinking. Mine can't. I see my family do it, and I marvel at their ability to shut out any new idea that goes against something they already believe and like believing. Yes, all of our brains process information and accept or reject it as true or false. When I see or hear something provably true, I don't seem to have the ability to reject it as false. That is, I don't feel I have a conscious choice in the matter. I can't convince myself something false is true once I see it proven false. So no, I don't have active control of that. But then again, you can't make yourself believe in Santa Claus. Even if your life depended on it, you couldn't. Did you choose not to believe in the tooth fairy? No, your brain realized it was absurd and let go of the idea at some point. 

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