The OTHER roots of belief

How well do you think you know the reasons you believe what you do?
You may think, when considering other people, that they have their beliefs to soothe themselves, to justify their actions, because Daddy said it so it must be true....etc. IOW 'those people' belief what they believe because it makes them feel better or keeps them from feeling worse. Is it possible that you also believe things for similar reasons?
Do you try to get to these OTHER roots of your beliefs?
Do you think it is important for you to do this or only other people?
What methods do you use?

 

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I beleve in myself so I try to understand who I am everyday a little better. Perhaps the moment of my death I will understand fully of who I am but until then I just keep trying to learn more daily.

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I believe what makes sense to me, I accept it need not make sense to everyone else.

 

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What methods do you use to try to understand yourself better?
Have you ever discovered that you believed something for reasons other than the one's you previously thought?
Feel free to be specific with the belief and what happened once you realized the roots were not what you had thought.

 

Have you ever realized, later, that something 'made sense' to you for reasons other than you thought. For example: it had seemed like you were rationally convinced by evidence and argument and experience. In fact it turned out that you had been selectively noticing things and potential problems with the arguments for emotional reasons. (there are other possible examples)

 

"What methods do you use to try to understand yourself better?"

Listening to what others tell me about what they think about me. Educating myself through reading and schooling. Trying not to make the same mistakes more than once. Those are a few examples.


"Have you ever discovered that you believed something for reasons other than the one's you previously thought?


Yes, I was taught to believe in God but after seeking out the truth I now understand that there's no God ,per say, to me, but do understand why others still believe in him as I once did. Those people believe in what they are told to.

I was also told to believe that anyone other than my ethnic group , white, were less valued than whites which I learned in time is a very wrong belief to have and I have changed my beliefs many many years ago and see everyone as an equal. There's always smarter and less educated people everywhere but that's not due to their ethnicity.


"Feel free to be specific with the belief and what happened once you realized the roots were not what you had thought."

 

Sure, happens all the time. One tends to have certain patterns in the way they think and sometimes, we are lucky enough to recognise it. For example, I always believed that western countries were rich because they were doing it right. I used to think poverty was self imposed because people like my parents had made their way inspite of it. That welfare was unnecessary and weakened society by catering to the lazy. I was lucky to be exposed to opportunities that showed me the shallowness of my thoughts.

 

I make an effort (read: I write down a list of associations that come up in my mind in relation to a belief I hold, and then evaluate those associations) not to bug myself so much with why I believe this or that, but instead with whether acting on this or that belief would be good for me or not.
Of course, this, too, comes down to why I believe this or that would be good for me or not. But once I analyze my beliefs down to this level, it gets so basic that I am left with unprovable premises and apriori positions that are to me a matter of life and death, and that I cannot justify other than with recourse to a particular religious philosophy.

I think it is important to investigate one's beliefs - for it is one's beliefs that inform one's (mental, verbal and bodily) actions, and one's actions then decide whether one will live in misery or in happiness.

 

No. Whatever I believe, I believe because I am convinced it is truth even if it's counterproductive.

 

That is actually begging the question - to believe because you are convinced it is the truth. "To believe x" means "to be convinced x is true" anyway.

You yet have to answer why you believe whatever you believe - why you are convinced it is true.

 

There is no single answer to that.

 

Feel free to be specific.

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I don't know what I believe.. :shrug:

 

Believe in what you are and what you stand for.

 

Do you ever actively seek out an evaluation or someone's opinion? (and, by the way, that certain fits what I mean) IOW, do you ever have a nagging doubt or question in your own mind about yourself or how you came to a particular belief and ask other people to give you their impression of you as a way to find out about yourself.

I can see how this might affect your beliefs, but have you ever read something and realized that the reasons you thought you believed something were actually not the real reasons.

So you believed because you were told that this was true - by adults/parents? And then it sounds like other people told you different ideas about other races. At any point in this process did you find out that the reasons you believed something were not the reasons you thought. For example. Some white men think that black men are better lovers. Rather than facing this fear directly they have projected their anger about this onto the black men and seen them as rapists. So the white men thought their belief that black men were sexually aggressive was based on statistics or accurate street theories, when in fact their belief was based on a fear of sexual inadequacy that was not being faced directly.

This is an example of what I mean. How the actual underpinnings or cause of a belief is not what the conscious mind thinks it is. And how one becomes aware of the real reasons. And then how one can get better at finding the real reasons.

 

So, luck or circumstance presented you with counterexamples and this changed your belief. But that is not quite what I was getting at.

You believed Western countries were doing it right. You probably thought you had reached this conclusion rationally - look how many cars they have? and whatever somewhat thought out or not so thought out arguments and observations that seemed to support this theory.

Later you encountered the counterexamples or evidence that your belief was possible not correct and then more clearly you decided 'not correct'.

Did you, after this change, realize that your beliefs earlier might have actually not been based on rational arguments and observations? For example, guilt or shame could make one be selective in the way one takes in information and so you drew conclusions that fit these feelings.

Or...

Perhaps it would have scared you to think they did not deserve their wealth. You could, for example, have been afraid of your own anger. Or that it might seem like a lack of humility to judge others.


My interest here is not so much how we change beliefs, but rather how do we find out the real reasons we have a belief.

Related topics, of course.

 

Could you perhaps give me a specific example. I realize you have done this rather openly here in a number of threads, but in the context of discovering that a belief you had and the reasons you had this belief
and then
realizing that you had the belief for other reasons.

I realize you may not have intended to make a change. You may not have a specific method to get at the reasons you have a certain belief. Nevertheless I think some of us, at least, have come to realize at times that we believed this or that because, for example, we could not face this2 or that2.

 

I am not sure which question your 'no' is in answer to.
Are you saying here that all your beliefs are based on rational analysis and that you have never thought you believed something for rational reasons and then later realized it was because of something else?

 

Which isn't quite my question, though it is a good one and a related one.

I have experienced insight moments where I realized that I believed in something for reasons other than the one my conscious mind had.

For example. I used to be more trustful despite evidence to the contrary. IOW I would trust people and needed a good deal of evidence not to trust them, especially in certain contexts, like work - (I know, duh). Anyway, I thought I was a nice guy and it was my 'temperment' and that I 'knew ways' to bring out the good in people. Then something happened at a workplace. There was a conspiracy theory about this event. I evaluated the information about this conspiracy. I decided 'rationally' that the events were coincidental and that the conspiracy was far fetched.

Later when it came out that the conspiracy theory was actually quite accurate, I realized -when my feelings in response to this situation started bubbling up - that the real reason my evaluation had come out 'no conspiracy' were probably to avoid these very feelings. I was angry. I didn't want to be the angry Simon. I am a nice guy. This network of ideas necessitated not noticing things. I was quite capable of examining evidence as well, perhaps even better than some of those who believed right off in the conspiracy. (which only added to my certainty that I was right and they were paranoid).

Theory: I had a belief because of rational analysis which I was better at than others with other opinions.
Countertheory: I had and clung to a belief related directly to trust to aviod certain feelings and perhaps acts - quitting.

I don't want to narrow the field down to
apparant rationality
really having an avoided emotional base. I think other patterns may be found here.

But that is the example that came up.

 

You've hinted here at something that I believe is crucial to any 'analysis' of belief.

Have you considered that "belief" and "rational" are contradictory?

I suspect that not only are the two states contradictory, they are also mutually exclusive. It has been my experience that the more I analyze a belief, the more suspect it becomes.



..just food for thought...

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