Quotations and Literature Forum

What do you think? I'm very fond of facts myself. Do you not think belief can only become true when it becomes certainty with proof? How important do you think belief and conviction are? I'm not talking about morals and ideals, but about religion, weather, future, etc.

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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

Personally, I think it depends on the person. Some people will need proof for everything, such as the world being created through the big bang. But there are others who do not need proof at all. There are those who believe in God without having any physical, touchable proof. It all depends on the subject of our belief.

usually I would require proof, but I'll belt anyone who slags of the tooth fairy, he's lovely.

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السلام عليكم

I don't believe in nothing

Honestly saying, I believe in what I see ... sounds like visual proofs overwhelm my mind. This could be due to lack of trust, yes could be ... like I have to see what you say could be happening or taking place to believe the whole said theory or concept.

Still this does not contradict with my belief/religion yet I have not seen God in flesh but He gave me visual proofs that He strongly exists ... sometimes I thought I was lucky that I was saved from a certain predicament or bad situation but when comes to be systematically happening then this must be organized by a superior creator - God.

As human beings we lean on our limited options like the eyes to see, nose to smell, ears to hear and so on ... until scientific discoveries "proved" to us that we are more limited than we could imagine ... bacterias and others microbes could not be observed unless under microscopes which mean that our weakness to behold them does not negate their existence.

Its a broad subject matter indeed ... pretty interesting ... thanks for posting.


Libra.

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Being a lady is an attitude.

belief is important...

God to you, statistics to me

No but seriously, when you don't know how something works, I understand you try to explain it with some kind of theory, but how can a theory ever become conviction. By the way, I don't think arguments like "it's not that, so it must be this" and "there must be an answer" are acceptable proof, you can't just suppose you know the answers and then pick one, maybe there is much more out of your line of sight.
I think God is an answer for people who feel the need to understand, but can't because there is no such thing as absolute knowledge.

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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

Let's look at it from another angle: many if not all conflicts in the world are due to misunderstandings between cultures with different convictions, and one or both are always based on theory. If the whole world was based on facts and truth, a dispute would be solved just by putting both parties' "bricks" together and build a new truth. No more opinions, only knowledge and ignorance ?

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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

So what I want of my chest is that, today, the only thing belief and religion bring is the exact opposite of what they originally stand for: hate and discordance.

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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

A belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth. The falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection to a judgment. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species preserving, perhaps even species cultivating. To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

What makes a belief true or false I call a "fact." The particular fact that makes a given belief true or false I call its "objective," and the relation of the belief to its objective I call the "reference" or the "objective reference" of the belief. Thus, if I believe that Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, the "objective" of my belief is Columbus's actual voyage, and the "reference" of my belief is the relation between my belief and the voyage--that relation, namely, in virtue of which the voyage makes my belief true (or, in another case, false). "Reference" of beliefs differs from "meaning" of words in various ways, but especially in the fact that it is of two kinds, "true" reference and "false" reference. The truth or falsehood of a belief does not depend upon anything intrinsic to the belief, but upon the nature of its relation to its objective. The intrinsic nature of belief can be treated without reference to what makes it true or false.
-Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, Lecture XII. Belief

As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else. The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.
-Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape

The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth…
If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning.
-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, pp. 80-81, 1951
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