A reader writes:
Your reader writes:
"So unlike your reader I did make a choice based on research and a (hopefully) rational weighing of the lack of evidence. Ehrman started out not particularly religious, became a hard line evangelical, and then became at least an agnostic if not an atheist. So I do believe that one’s religious beliefs are a choice, it maybe a choice that many people are born into and never leave their comfort zone to question, but it is a choice."
This reader confuses and confounds two separate choices – the choice to believe, and the choice to seek truth. If we search any subject with intellectual honesty, belief is manifest by what we find, not by what we choose to find.
That which appears reasonable or probable in some sense becomes what we believe, and we cannot choose to change this back to what we believed before we acquired this new knowledge and experience. I believe many things. In other words, I believe that which appears true.
I have witnessed the peace, satisfaction, and comfort that seems to come from religious faith. I have desperately tried to believe things that will provide such comfort for me. Unfortunately, the physical, objective truth of most religion and its hypothetical metaphysics continue to appear extremely unlikely to have any basis in reality. Based upon the information gleaned from my senses, including the thousands of years writings and accounts of other people with similar sensory facilities, most religious doctrine doesn't fall, no matter how I try, into the "probably true" bin of my my perception of reality. I can only choose where and how to search. I cannot choose what I will find there, and it frustrates me. I would rather believe in a loving god, and be able to share this faith with a like-minded community, but my mind can't do it.
No matter how hard I try, I cannot believe that there was a man physically like ourselves, but who was somehow part deity, performed acts generally contrary to what is known of physics, and whose body physically disappeared from this plane of existence within three days of his death.
I fail to understand how believing or disbelieving such things can be a choice. I wish it were. Others have told me "just believe it". Such a statement is the equivalent of a foreign language. Believe it? How? It is apparently a language that is foreign to me, but fluent to others.
If you know how to flip this switch in my brain, please let me know.
Another reader makes the same point from the other side of the divide:
The reader who defends faith as being a matter of choice seems to be confusing the fact that we can choose things that will lead to a change in faith with faith itself being a choice. I was an atheist for a long time; my family never went to church or participated in any religious events. I chose to go to Church, to research religion. My faith itself, however, is not a choice. After going to church, after doing research, I was not presented with a choice between two beliefs, "God exists" and "God doesn't exist". Instead, I simply came to believe that God exists. While choice certainly plays a role in faith — in what knowledge we seek — it's hard to imagine that it could have been a choice to make. For me, it was an unavoidable conclusion based on my experiences.
Perhaps this is the most civil and honest explanation of the real difference between believers and non-believers.
The Dish 