Do you really believe what you think you believe?

Deleted Account · May 26, 2017

I remember once hearing this pastor say, Don't tell me what you believe, show me how you live. Because how you live shows me what you truly believe.

Lately I've been listening to the Irish philosopher Peter Rollins. I find what he has to say on Christianity, atheism, social media, identity and marriage to be interesting.

I recently listen to him being interviewed on the Drunk Ex-Pastors podcast. I found what he had to say on the issue of belief to be intriguing. You can listen to the full, unedited interview here. But here's some quotes of what he said:

In America and the western world we love intellectual belief...
I believe I don't know what I believe. I believe we protect ourselves from really seeing what we believe...
We think all sorts of crazy things but we don't know because our consciousness is designed to protect us. That's why you have to do something like psychoanalysist because we don't know... what we believe.

Christianity is ultimately bringing us into an embrace of meaningless, it's bringing us to a place of earthiness, into unknowing doubt, complexity and ambiguity...

Here's an interesting study that was done recently: they got a group of self-declared theists and atheists and they got them to say positives, negatives and neutral statements... What they found is the stress level among atheists and theists were exactly the same, in terms of when they were asking God to kill their child horribly, and actually it was not to do with just saying the horrible things because they also did it with fate. And they found that same amount of people (theists and atheists) tried to withdraw their statements.

You may think that you're an atheist but you might be a theist. Now of course this experiment isn't good for the theist, because what theists believes that God would burn up their family just because you ask? It just shows that we have magical thinking going on and we're not even aware of it. Here's the problem: you think you're beyond this but it's not done with you. If something happens, you lose your job, someone you love dies, you might find that that unconscious god rises up again you and you find yourself back in evangelicalism... Someone might call themselves a theists or an atheist but actually deep down they're something else. It takes a lot of work to know whatr you are.
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LavaMe · May 26, 2017

Surfing Poet said: ↑

I remember once hearing this pastor say, Don't tell me what you believe, show me how you live. Because how you live shows me what you truly believe.
Click to expand...

I've thought this before but it is a bit simplistic. We also have our passions. They move us to act in certain ways. We have reason and free will which can allow us to act rightly, but the passions pull on us. As we give into the passions then our reason becomes clouded and our will weakened. We then tend to act irrationally. A person may believe something but act at odds with that not because they don't believe it but because they've weakened their reason and will.

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Do you really believe what you think you believe?

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