Nothing New Here.

[Gohangr]

Originally Posted by Chowhound

Your take here couldn't be further from reality. Your post seem to have a passive aggressive sort of vibe.

I don't really know the other poster, but I read his question as sincere and you did seem to answer kind of "dodgy", so maybe your reaction and the topic are connected.

I don't think there are true believers as you describe them. Some people are more positive than others but it's utopian to think that these people don't have a care in the world.
I'm not saying that, that is what you are saying, but I think you have a kind of "the grass is greener on the other side" attitude as far as this topic goes.
Confidence or belief is a skill that one can build with self reflection. Maybe you can take a step back and look at what other people are envious of you - this is also a pretty easy question to ask someone, since it's basically asking "what do you like about me".

What are some traits that you find positive about yourself or some things that you enjoy in your life?

[shelato]

Originally Posted by Chowhound

As in the title, my thoughts here aren't new.

I'm envious of the believers.

I remember going to church as an 11 yr old. Local church rounded up some of us kids and told us about the lord and our savior.

I mean no disrespect to anyone or any religion.

I'm an INTJ, alway score that way. Logical science based view of the world. Test for repeabilty, question results, wash, rinse, and repeat.

I could never shake the idea that religion is a psychological way of coping with the inevitable death that finds us all. Roll the clock back several hundred years ago when life was miserable. Disease, death, abject poverty. People died young by today's standards. Life sucked.

The promise of something or someone who cares about you and the idea of a beautiful afterlife that organized religion proposed must of had some appeal.

Every culture across the millenia has similar notions hence why I'm wondering if it's built in our psyche, lizard brain, if you will.

How does a spider weave a web? How does a myriad of natural phenomena happen? Who or what drives this?

Take every question you have and keep asking, why or what.

Big bang? What or who caused that? Just keep going backwards.

I realize this is a bit disjointed on my part.

Did I mention that I'm envious of the believers?

I am a post-rationalist. I don't think any of us are is consistently rational including myself. I think humans are excellent at pattern recognition and in a given situation I think some are better than others about thinking rationally about a given problem, but it's often difficult to think rationally about a given subject, so we rely on cognitive short cuts and these cognitive shortcuts create cognitive distortions that interfere with consistently being totally rational.

If you aren't sure what is a cognitive distinction here are some of the more frequent ones. I have fallen prey to many of them.I suspect I am not the only one. https://psychcentral.com/lib/cogniti...t-and-examples

Science relies on independent 3rd party confirmation of results. Which is why it works as well as it does. As an abstraction that sounds great in theory, but in practice, humans have trouble just agreeing about basic facts because our thinking is often tribal. What is a girl, depending on whether you are on team red or team blue, we arrive at different answers. Part of the reason the political system doesn't work is that we can't even agree about basic facts. I suspect we have evolved cognitive processes that help us thrive in groups but also distort our thinking processes to help us thrive in the tribe

Whether or not there is an actual God, I am pretty sure we have evolved mechanisms for religiosity. Pretty much every culture has some sort of religion. Religion seems pretty culturally universal.

There are also non theistic religions like Buddhism, that make no claim regarding the existence or non-existence of a deity.

The new atheists thought if we got rid of God that we would enter a new age of enlightenment. I think they are naive. Yes we are getting rid of a belief in God but we aren't getting more rational. I see no evidence of that occuring. Instead I think the evolved mechanism for religion didn't go away but just asserts itself in new non theistic psuedo religions that are springing up. I look at Kendism, practiced by the followers of Ibram X. Kendi as an example of a new forms of religious fundamentalism, it has different version of original sin and a different pantheon of sinners and saints than Christianity, but the underlying mechanisms are the same in both. It functions as a religion for people who claim they are too rational for a belief in God but are they really as rational as there self talk tells them they are? Or is that more motivated reasoning?

As you look around I see a lot of religious thinking. I see cults of personality around Trump and Bernie.its not a left right thing.

Religious thinking isn't going away, it's form is changing.

The advantage I see with the established religions is that we are aware of their flaws.