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Shouldn't Life Be About More Than Happiness?

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Posted by Mario Dovalina on June 11, 2001 20:57:45 UTC

When I was a child, I believed there were monsters living under my bed. I would hide under my blanket as a method of "escaping" from them. If I didn't see them, they couldn't see me. If I denied their existence, they would cease to exist. If I stopped believing in them, the effects they had on me would vanish. So it makes sense to say that the effects they had on me existed only in the context of my belief, namely, existed only in my mind. The issue of religion is parallel to this. Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

I said "The loss of those beliefs [beliefs that are unfounded] aren't worth many regrets." By this I meant that if the foundations of a belief are so fragile that I can destroy them with relatively basic arguments, then the fact that they were destroyed is not worth worrying about. If I am proven wrong, I am satisfied, because I just learned something. If a theist is proven wrong about God, their entire basis of belief is shattered. Honestly, if a god did exist, I would be elated. I know I can achieve happiness by simply decieving myself into a religious belief. But that won't do for me.

Crowslayer, you said "The advent of TRUTH comes
with the MAJORITY."

And you call ME a pragmatist? Have you ever read 1984? Truth is NOT decided by the majority. If everyone in the world believed I had an invisible dragon in my garage (thank you, Carl Sagan) would it make the dragon real? If I was standing on train tracks with a locomotive bearing down on me, and yet I believed with all my heart and soul that it wasn't there, would it stop me from getting splattered all over the surrounding area? Our perception of truth is not 100% accurate, I will give you that. But we can get close. Certainly closer than believing in whatever we want. The theory of relativity is MORE accurate than Newtonian physics. The Bohr model of the atom is MORE accurate than previous ones. A Unified Field Theory would be MORE accurate than quantum mechanics. We may never reach truth. But some theories are closer than others.

And simply believing what you want is a sure fire way of being happy, content, and wrong.

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