In message
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Martin Goldman <[log in to unmask]> writes
>And I think that is where the point is.
>Belief is belief, and nothing else.
Are we talking about "belief" as "I believe in God the father almighty."
or "belief" as in "we hold these truths to be self-evident" or "belief"
as in "eating people is wrong"?
Or even as in there is a fundamental difference between a sleeping and a
dead dog: I believe there is something called "life" - or at any rate,
there is a lack of this - er - property - when life slips away...
>The problems come when people say "my belief is better than your belief"
>and "my belief is right, and yours is wrong"................and to prove
>this I will kill you/torture you/ convert you to my belief.
Lots of Christian - and Muslim - subdivisions have felt this about
fellow believers: see Northern Ireland, Shia / Sunni differences (all
right, I am not clear whether Catholics think Protestants are Christians
in the context of this debate: and all religions seem to regard
"heretics" as worse than total non-believers!)
>
>So succinctly put: just because it is a belief does not make it correct
>(except in the mind of the believer, and that may be a delusion).
True.
Same applies to scientific laws - which are rational attempts to derive
predictive rules for the behaviour of nature: the belief that the world
was flat got disproved - with pain to those who had invested in this
belief - by scientific observation and new beliefs based on these
observations.
Some beliefs may need to be changed in the face of new evidence.
Could someone tell me why my firmly held beliefs that "eating people is
wrong" is true: it might be a delusion (delusions are personal) and
therefore not - necessarily - held by the rest of you?
--
Mary Hawking
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