Why We Wanted to Believe

I was going to talk about you know why we wanted to believe and someone commented on one of my videos saying why should he believe anything that I say just because we got a bunch of scientists who expert specialists know all they have a theories they can't prove and he doesn't understand that you know they can actually prove most or all of it of course he thinks that if these PhD professors had any common sense then they believe the same credulous fables he does despite the fact that it's got talking snakes and donkeys and the Sun stopping in the sky and all of that sort of thing yet somehow he thinks that book has proven itself in that science hasn't this is a huge mystery for me because I encounter people who think like this all the time I've talked to several people who've made this claim that the Bible has proved itself in Sciences not none of them can show me how their book or their interpretation of that book had gotten anything right ever they simply don't question that or won't question that most of them won't even read the book anyone when they do or whether they do regardless they just imagine that it says whatever they want it to say and I've done other presentations talking about how people read between the lines and then they don't read the lines and they won't question that but they'll question whatever I can show that we actually know and prove to be true and a little confused at how they think like that - I've seen plenty of people I've actually seen people literally put their fingers in their ears to defend their their belief from the reality you know the Specht that they know that what they believe is not really true they just want to protect that anyway and I was on a debate an online debate a written debate and the admin deleted the entire conversation with the admission that he did so because he realized I was making sense and he didn't want anyone else to notice because he didn't want to change his mind that's how dishonest faith is so people asked me why can't I believe what I want to believe after I've already proven that what they believe is not true why would you want to believe something after you know it's not true this is a mystery to me I don't have the need to believe that a lot of other people do obviously it's something I can't even relate to it's like an an investigation for me to figure out why people want to believe or make a believe because that's what I'm convinced that it is one woman told me that if I say anything against her religion that seems to make sense it is only because it is the devil speaking through me for he is the lord of lies so that any challenge to her faith wouldn't prompt her to think the way I'm hoping that she will instead it'll cause her to double-down with the what is that they the backfire effect because she'll know that she's engaging with the devil and that she needs to believe harder how do you believe harder when they say it's like when I say if you believe hard enough Tinkerbell will be alive again it means you're trying to convince yourself that means you're pretending right and at some point you'd think these people must be aware that that's what they're doing right it's literally a fantasy the idea is that if you can just convince yourself then you can live in this land of pure imagination and then you won't be of this world it'll be like a matrix like illusion where you'll have special powers where you can suddenly command to cancer to go into remission or tell that mountain to jump into the ocean and it will you just gotta believe of course it doesn't really work no mountain has ever left from one place to another and imagine the tsunami that would happen if it did this is something Jesus ought to think about before he tells people to do these things it's all about the power of pretend if you believe hard enough you can cure diabetes or you could have if you were pure of heart but now that your subject has died we see that your your faith wasn't pure enough so there's always logical fallacies and double standards and confirmation biases culminating in a culture that cultivates this reinforces this deadly delusion and psychiatrists define delusion as a fixed false belief that will not change despite evidence to the contrary and they have an exception in their medical journals that you know this applies except in the case of religion really seriously special exception why if the belief is irrational as religious belief certainly is by definition then why can't we say so why are we being inappropriately polite to a debilitating cognitive impediment I acknowledge that everyone has the right to believe whatever they're compelled to believe for whatever reason similarly they have a right to not believe it any more when it doesn't make sense anymore and I think that the ability to think and wonder freely is the most basic of all human rights yet it is religion and not reason that opposes even that by prohibiting or by enforcing required beliefs by everything by enforcing required beliefs and prohibited beliefs and threatening free thought with the threat of a fate worse than death some people think of religion as a disease of the mind but I don't I think of it more like an addiction it has the same chemical and emotional cues as some addictions and it must be a hell of a drug because people will fight for it against all reason and I remember one guy who pretended to be very objective about his belief but then he very quickly admitted that he would rather take a bullet in the ear than to give up his faith so much for his objectivity that he wanted me to believe in and I said that's another thing a lot of believers don't want anything to ever be objective a well-known Christian apologist told me that not even facts can be objective nothing ever can be because believers will not allow anything to clear the fog from their minds that keeps them from believing and sometimes they'll admit that they don't care what the truth is they just want to believe what they want to believe they don't need evidence to convince them as long as they can keep ignoring the evidence that proves them wrong don't harsh my does man and the analogy of addiction works a couple of other ways too one is because believers think they're happier than non-believers much like drunks think they're happier than sober people and another is also like sex smokers tend to be the most outspoken enemies of smoking right because they know they have personal experience for how poisonous this is and former believers also have the shame of being duped by their former religion and very very often they were abused within that religion and just like with all the sexy imagery that is traditionally associated with smoking you know especially in classic movies you have the same sort of thing with religious belief such that believers are good upstanding moral and people while unbelievers are sinful and slobby slovenly baby-eating heathens wallowing in the darkness of our God forsaken miserable damnable existence so if you're Christian it means that you're good and clean and nice and you gots common sense but if you dare admit that you can't really take those fables seriously then it is only because you hate everything about our decent law-abiding culture in a free country so why don't you go to some suitably oppressive communist Muslim wasteland and whereas I would say that a fool is one who too readily accepts improbable claims from questionable sources on insufficient evidence believers obviously don't see it that way somehow credulous gullibility regarding the most repugnant fables known to man is seen as a virtue and it's supposed to make believers better than you know rational thinking people because better because faith is portrayed as a virtue as if having an unreasonably closed and incurious prejudiced mind is a good thing better because faith somehow makes you more moral than those who are merely good for their own health or for the benefit of society without a fear of posthumous damnation a better because they don't have to know what the real truth is they don't even have to know what the word truth means they can just recite their favorite lie and call that the absolute truth with a capital T while denigrating anyone who honestly knows better belief means having an excuse that explains everything they don't understand and they don't even have to understand that they don't understand it or that it doesn't explain anything they just pretend they're just pretending to know what they know they don't know and they have to do that where else they're not believing hard enough and all of that makes them better than any honest person who isn't content to pretend things that aren't true and instead who only wants to understand reality as it is regardless what the truth turns out to be now how did this rift divide the rational and irrational perspective I know that not all atheists are rational we're not all logically contemplative philosophy of science scholars or honorable humanists anybody on social media knows that by now we can't all pretend like we're sophisticated intellectuals anymore and in fairness I do have to admit that there are some religious believers of strong faith who can be quite convinced that they're rational even though they're not of course I want to be as generous as possible but the idea that there's such a thing as a reasonable faith is still a contradiction this guy commenting on my video said that if anything is so complicated that scientists haven't figured it all out yet completely and know it all for certain 100% then it must be the work of some magic invisible genie or something equally silly that's the only thing that makes sense to him but if we have trouble coming up with a cure for cancer it isn't because God was so clever that he designed cancer to fool us and how does this guy not understand that the closer you look at anything you can imagine the more complex it turns out to be and this is the truth this is the nature of nature itself everything is like that the idea that gods and magic are they are the simplest and most infantile excuses men have ever dreamt up to explain anything and it doesn't explain anything creation has challenged me all the time how to show that life came from non-life without God how do you explain life without God and I do show them ways that that can happen but more importantly I point out that they can't explain how anything happens with God right how does God do anything magic words let there be and they say God is the answer but it's not maybe you can hi pop you can hypothesize that something happened by magic whereby alien intervention-- or whatever you want to make up but it doesn't become the answer until you can show that it is and until you can show that there's some truth in it then there evidently is no truth in it and that is the burden of proof that believers hate so much they want to push it off onto us because you know that's fine because we can meet that burden but they can't and they know they can't and I suspect that they know why they can't because religious belief is all about pretend it's not what they believe so which is what they make believe it's about asserting baseless empty speculation as if it were certain fact and then pretending to know what you don't know anything about how many times have you heard a believer state as fact what they believe is as though it was something they could confirm if challenged claiming facts that are not facts or feigning knowledge you don't have our both lies but that's what all religions do and depend on if creationist tries to challenge me on my worldview they can only tell me what they believe but I can show what I know and the facts to back it up which we believers can't do and that's why a religious belief is dependent on irrational flaws and reasoning every logical fallacy has been used as an argument for God and every argument for God is a logical fallacy and just because something is complex it doesn't mean God did it look how complex theology is even if you imagine that yours is the one true faith and you're the one that has the real relationship with your imaginary friend and that everybody else with any other religion is just crazy and pretends that they have what you do you still have to admit that their theology is very complex even if you believe that they just made it up themselves so look at Hinduism the oldest religion and continuous practice with myriad denominations and traditions based on a library of sacred scriptures not just one book and all of their books are older than any of the books in the Bible there are 800 million Hindus way more than Protestant Christians the matter of fact if Catholics are not really Christian as many Protestants insist then Christianity is not the dominant religion Islam is and then Catholicism then Hinduism and then Protestants Baptist Pentecostal medicine cetera we've made up a bunch of gods and we made up different versions of them we have thousands of interpretations of distinct denominations of different religions that are all just the heresies of some theologians imagination I encountered a arrogant conceited and pompous professor of theology last year at a seminary school who looked down at his nose at me and described himself as the illusion how the could anybody be a serious theologian theology is the study of the nature of God and of religious belief but there is no nature of God God doesn't have properties and if he did no one would or could know how to identify them because there is not one fact that anyone can verify or falsify that anybody could actually know right so nobody knows what they're talking about one interpretation is just as good as everyone else's they're they're all equally invalid everyone claiming a relationship with a personal God simply imagines their invisible friend is whatever they want it to be and that's why it matters so much to them and there's no way to distinguish anyone's religious belief from the illusions of dilution if there is nothing anyone can objectively verify or falsify about their God then there's nothing anyone can know about God because there is no fact to start with and thus nothing you could actually study so theology is just a study of belief it's just the fables that men made up about their gods it's a scholarship in mythology and that's why having a PhD in theology is virtually the same as having a doctorate in Mother Goose if you can't confirm the accuracy of your claims to any degree at all by any means whatsoever then it is a fact that you don't actually know what you claim to know so much for the claim that you can't know anything without God it turns out you can't know anything with God matter of fact just believing in God can't prevent you from knowing things so what about this God shaped hole in our hearts what some people refer to as being hardwired for God belief this is how he described that in my book did you ever get the feeling you're being watched we humans are very self conscious sort so it's not at all unusual that we think others are paying close attention to us and awareness of that possibility is a necessity when you're living in area where there may be large predators stealthily closing in so it's easy to see how that feeling could have been ingrained in our psyche over the ages of course our psychology is much more complicated than that because we're also a social species even when no one is watching it still matters what anyone who looks at us might see at any moment secret admirers maybe gazing at us undercover rivals maybe they're too sizing us up to find our weaknesses or there may be concealed critics ready to ridicule anything they notice our conduct and our appearance are always subject to judgment even when we think we're alone any mistake or embarrassing moment might have been seen by someone and may be reported to someone else whatever we did today that we think might be secret might come back to visit us tomorrow and could change the course of the rest of our lives so we need to be aware that there may be eyes spying on us at any time just because you can't see them doesn't mean they don't see you so if it is safer to assume that you're never really alone ever better to conduct yourself as if someone may be watching and that it matters to them who you are and what you're doing if that sounds paranoid it shouldn't I think that's just the way normal people normally behave but there are also those who take it to extreme who are convinced that they're under constant surveillance at all times that all of their actions and sometimes even their thoughts are being noted by someone somehow each of us tends to place ourselves in the center of our world in fact we're individually so self-centered that if we're not the center of attention we complain that we should be that we're not getting the attention we deserve and we naturally assume that someone potentially could be examining us at any time or maybe even all the time it is natural for us to feel that way even when it is irrational and we're also very good at recognizing patterns and making connections and we're still analytical even when we're irrational it's just that our analysis may be focused on our primary suspicions and biased against any more logical options consequently some patterns emerge in our minds appearing as though they were orchestrated as if what had happened before will happen again not because of diminishing probabilities but because we think that's what's supposed to have one person's a string of successes may begin to look like luck and we may imagine that that person is blessed and that they have advantages being manipulated by outside entities and similarly one who sin who suffers several successive setbacks may appear to be cursed and so we will think that they are one of them is being punished and the other rewarded and of course the reason would be is that they must have done something to deserve whatever is happening to them it's the simplest form of Karma that what goes around comes around for people who think this way of course then you know nothing ever happens by accident everything happens for a reason and one of my favorite shows as a kid was the Twilight Zone with Rod Serling and the pattern that I noticed that was that everybody got their just desserts good-natured Pleasant and charitable characters always seemed to do alright because the author of that reality didn't want to yeah he didn't want to torment kindly people and he knew his audience didn't want that either but the people who were cruel greedy selfish prejudiced and so on we're going to face ironic consequences as a sort of poetic justice as if the universe cared about balancing good and evil not only does it seem Donnelly's life often seemed to be that way but it seems like it should be that way wouldn't it be great if it was that way that's why it's so nice to pretend that it is and I'm sorry to say that I'm as guilty as anyone else for holding this sort of irrational feeling all my life it seemed that I had established some sort of a deal with the fates that I would never have great wealth and fame you know at the same time I wouldn't be sitting in a prison or it were suffering through some chronic debilitating condition I was in some middle ground because karma charges a price for great advantages and there were certain things that you know I'm not gonna get that advantage but then I'm not also gonna have to suffer through something that I couldn't even deal with so it didn't bother me that I wasn't some wealthy celebrity because I wasn't in prison either and it didn't matter that I've always been poor and hounded by debt collectors had never had nice things because I had a pretty good misspent youth I'm fortunate enough that in my youth I was good-looking and always in great health and I considered that to be a pretty good deal it really did seem that I'd struck a deal with something that I was in effect blessed so you're gonna see how it's easy to imagine people being that way these days I realize that simply having a positive attitude can account for a lot of that and otherwise I logically understand that things can't really be orchestrated this way everybody wants to think that everything happens for a reason you know God sees every sparrow fall and so forth and you know God will help you find your keys or win the game Wow exactly what is the mechanism that God uses to you know and and why does he ignore all these really sincere requests I mean wouldn't you think okay I can't find my keys and this other person can't find their child you know wouldn't you just say okay I don't care if the if the Cowboys lose the game okay take my wet dope to put it off under her somebody with a you know more sincere prayer than mine and consequently that the last religious belief I ever gave up was karma I held on to that one as long as I could because I really wanted to believe that there was some innate sense of justice in the universe especially when I say terrible people getting everything they want despite exploiting or victimizing others in making the situation worse the villains very often feel vindicated and victimized and they never realized that they're guilty of anything I mean is it always seems likely they feel justified in whatever they're stolen as if it was rightfully theirs to begin with that's not justice and it's not enough to imagine they're getting their punishment posthumously either Leviticus 26 says that we will experience our punishment in this life not the next one which is how it should be especially when you realize that you can't really have an afterlife anyway sadly I've seen too many cold cruel and thoughtless people excel at the expense of others while the nice guy finishes last and no one wants to mess with the sociopaths so those without compassion or compunction too often prevail in pressing others who never did anything to deserve what was wrought upon them unfortunately I'm not talking about my own experience but rather what I see happening to other people so I think that the object DT of his observation is objective being kind and charitable noble honest and so on doesn't mean that you'll be treated in accordance with your standards it should mean that and if there was a righteous God if there was a sense of justice or Karma it would mean that but if only there was some invisible rod serling writing the screenplays of our lives so religion doesn't grant knowledge or wisdom or morality which we haven't talked about Robert Ingersoll Robert Greene Ingersoll famously inaccurately observed that if a man were to follow today the teachings of the Old Testament he would be a criminal if he would follow strictly the teachings of the New Testament he would be insane and the way I put that flying saucers here the way I would put that is that anyone who uses the Bible as a moral guide would be considered immoral by every culture on the planet there are also negative correlations on the relationship between religion and child abuse prejudice or bigotry cognitive ability and education the more you know the less you believe and the more religious you are the more abusive you are and so on statistically so why does anyone commit themselves to believe that they know can't even be figuratively true I know people who will brag that they're Christians even though they're drug-addicted alcoholic fornicating criminal converts convicts on their third marriage they've never cracked open a Bible and don't care what it says and don't even know what a Creed is but they're better than us because they're Christian that means good for such people your religion is like your choice of football teams where we wouldn't even know you had a religion if you didn't wear the logo on your Jersey and take part in the game on Sunday and these obviously aren't real Christians no matter how pickle they may be it's more like a Christian cosplay so what about the sincere believers why do they believe and one of my friends identifies as Christian he says I'm Christian cuz I like to believe that not because they think it's true ok so some people pretend to believe what about the rest I've heard believers say that I believe because I want to know that I'm gonna see my dead son or father again as tragic as that is there again they're just pretending you may convince yourself you make believe to convince yourself that you're gonna see your dead relatives again but it still doesn't mean you know that another said well I have to believe because I don't want to go to hell but that means you believe in Hell already and hell wouldn't even be a threat if you didn't believe in it so figure that out and faced with the obvious indication that the Bible is a conglomeration of mythologies adopted and adapted from various religions I've seen believers admit that none of that could have happened as described yet they'll still say it has truth for me no it doesn't if it if it was true for you it would be true for me it'd be true for everybody else - and if it isn't true for me it's not true for you and someone else told me that they believe everything in the Old Testament ever they believe everything that happened in the Old Testament really happened even though that they know that that's impossible and the reason that they believe it is because I say they believe that Jesus believed it again they believed because they believed it's a circular argument routing back to an assumed conclusion but Jesus is not a reputable or reliable or even a real witness to any of this remember the story says that Jesus believed in Noah's Ark which we know didn't happen he also believed in the world was flat and he said that we didn't have to wash our hands because it doesn't matter what we put into our mouths that will not defile us because it doesn't go into our heart it only goes into our belly and is therefore or it is then eliminated so apparently Jesus thought it was fine to drink bleach because it'll just pour harmlessly out the other end so we know that Jesus didn't know anything about poison or nutrition or infectious microbes or drugs or even the earlier Jewish Scriptures that say that certain foods can make you impure if Jesus says you can put anything into your mouth without even washing it first I have to question his position on homosexuality - I'm sorry it was that at reverend jesus says that what comes out of a man's mouth will defile him because he believed in curses and magic words and he thought diseases were caused by demons and he cursed a tree for not bearing fruit out of season so if jesus was real and you met him in real life you would very quickly see that this is not the sort of man you would take advice from i rather than talk to people who may have grown up religious and therefore may have never had a rational thought i prefer to talk to those who say that they were once atheist before they became religious because their inability to answer this question is more illustrative of how dishonest faith really is of the few people that i've interviewed who claim to be atheist before becoming christian one of them that i could verify actually was in his position at one point she went back to her religious belief because she missed her church congregation where her husband and her entire family still is that's not a reason to believe that may be a reason to pretend to believe and in her case she had another reason which was that she lost reputation with atheists by pretending to have an academic degree that she didn't really earn and one of the another people another Christian that I interviewed lied having saying that she had converted to Christianity after examining the facts in evidence and I pressed her on that one don't think I didn't but after 20 minutes of grilling and char dodging the question about what that evidence was she finally admitted the fact is that the guys at the Christian table at her college were hot again that's not a reason to believe that's the reason to pretend to believe and you still could have shouted his name during that act anyway I also interviewed a petrol geologist claiming to be a former evolutionist who said that the evidence changed his mind but again he would not say what that evidence was he said it was personal and you would only discuss it privately so how scientific could that evidence be turns out that he was raised never to question the Bible even when the facts contradict it and that's why he was holding his position so he was never an evolutionist or an atheist or any of that he was just a liar and I recently maybe some of you saw this a week or so ago I interviewed a biochemist who was never religious until he fell victim to the god of the gaps fallacy he didn't understand some aspect of quantum physics and he decided that that meant that the universe was irrational so he made a conscious decision to become irrational - that's how he described it he rejected rationality if you can't explain something using methodological naturalism you can't just throw up your hands and say I don't know therefore magic especially when you throw on a bunch of other assumptions like that the Bible is true even though he says that it's actually not that we can prove that most of the Bible is not true but he says it's okay because you can just get rid of the whole Old Testament and just believe in Jesus how you like that for the ology he also says that the reason he's Christian is because he believes that Jesus has God in the flesh so again he believes in Jesus because he believes in Jesus and the real reason is that he's immersed in Christian theology and he doesn't know anything else and he's admitted that he had no reason to believe other than he simply wants and that seems to be what it comes down to and again I don't understand what the motivation is it should be that you wouldn't decide which God to believe in until you can verify that there is a God at all and you shouldn't believe in any supernatural thing until you've got indication that there is something supernatural and you can't just assume magic just because the real answer is unknown but this guy went backwards and just assumed the truth of the Bible as his first step worse than that he assumed that the New Testament is true even though says the Old Testament isn't and apparently this is the way you think when you reject rationality as he admits he has but the question begging arguments from ignorance and incredulity cannot be considered evidence of God and the fact that Jesus is described as a traveling magician and cult leader who couldn't do his faith healing schtick in his own hometown because the people who grew up with him knew him and knew that he was full of and that his knowledge was limited to just less than the other scholars of his day where he was even farmers of his naidu things he did it he's limited in knowledge to the learner or the writings of the other ignorant primitives of his time and all of this proves that he is not God so the reason the biochemist chose Christianity is the very reason he should have rejected it and some people think they see patterns of divine creation or divine design and no we see patterns of things that aren't there every time we look in the clouds but the indications are all of the indications are that man created gods in his own image when near first when the early humans first started fashioning things out of wet clay they they made lovely animals and wished that they could breathe into them the breath of life and then somebody else suggested to hey maybe somebody else has already done that and that meant that we might have come from clay figurines and they really like that story they got attached to that story until somebody said well I don't believe that so they killed it along with every other unbeliever until all that was left to think about natural selection here until all that was left was righteous defenders of the faith and look at the culture that has emerged from that for thousands of years we've been making myths of magical men and monsters all our folklore is full of fantasy our music and movies are riddled with religious references it's no coincidence that Thor existed in the old sagas and in modern marvel comics movies he was a magical hero then as now and I have to ignore some of the lyrics in my favorite songs because they're all about heaven and hell you know that's typical for heavy metal because you know it's the devil's music so a lot of people believe because they finds the fantasy and imagery more interesting than reality and I understand why a lot of the wood but it leads to the Oprah distortion where atheists can't experience aw or wonder we heard her say that yeah we can of course better than believers can and the reason that we can is because we have a concept in a comprehension of the of the reality we can appreciate the data rather than exaggerating everything we don't understand to say isn't God great every time we can't properly appreciate something for what it really is but the reason most people want to believe is because they ought to want to pretend that they'll never die where the tell exists in some conscious way after they die but either way they want to imagine that there's a meaning and a purpose to life and I never understood this one I never needed existence itself to have a meaning the idea is conceptually silly to me but for some see to some people understanding science or even humanist philosophy can prompt an uncomfortable realization like when Buzz Lightyear saw himself advertised on TV and realized that he is just a toy you know I remember that scene he even tried to evoke faith no it can't be true I could fly if I wanted to like a bird in the sky if I believe I can fly why I'd fly but realizing that you're not really a Space Ranger that you're just a toy must be I imagined like realizing that you are not the reason the universe exists and that maybe you're not best buds with the most powerful being imaginable an indomitable genie who can solve any problem even if it means making two plus two equal five it's got to be hard letting go of an imaginary friend who can do anything even when he obviously can't do anything at all and that's why religious believers object to reality so harshly often referring to other people as if they were just bags of chemicals the universe wasn't created just for you so you got to be pissy about it as if people have no value just because your fantasy didn't come true the fact that you exist doesn't mean that your God exists it doesn't mean anything you have no special purpose unless you mean that in the sense that Steve Martin did in the jerk it takes a virtue of humility to accept that you're not important enough on a cosmic scale to be part of any universal plan we can't have a universal plan certainly not under this administration but there is a beautiful message in Toy Story as Buzz Lightyear eventually realized when he accepted what he really is and learned how he matters to those who care about him and who need him even if there is a god the meaning of your life is determined by what your life meant to other people in addition to the purpose you've chosen for yourself thank you very much [Music]

Channel: AronRa

Views: 127,157

Rating: 4.9263396 out of 5

Keywords: Raleigh, North Carolina, atheism, atheist, freethought, triangle, society, Sue Kocher

Id: Z50lYQsABjs

Length: 37min 56sec (2276 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2017