Do I really not believe in God? Do you?

Shmi

Well, I used to think that I do not believe in anything supernatural that affects what happens to me, but I'm wondering if maybe I actually do alieve in it. For example, a few days ago I had a close call in traffic, and when a collision I fully expected to happen just a second prior did not transpire, I mentally thanked... whom? I definitely had a clear feeling of gratitude for escaping, and I don't normally mean it literally when I say "Thank God!". So, who or what did I feel thankful to? I've never been religious, and I got rid of most of my superstitions over the years, but apparently there is still something there, and I do not know how to react to this knowledge.

What would be the proper reaction after a close call? Shrug and say "got lucky this time, should be more cautious next time"? What about when waiting for a diagnosis, what does sort-of-praying "please, please, let everything be OK" say about one's true beliefs? I know that I am much better at not blaming the world when something bad happens to me by chance than at not thanking the world when something good happens. Should it not be symmetric? Which part of a normally non-religious person wakes up and asserts itself in a crisis situation out of their control? Should it be embraced, suppressed, worked on?

This sounds like it's just an emotional script, a trained mental routine to feel a certain way

This makes sense. I'm just wondering whether this script (something/someone is responsible for the good/bad stuff that happens to me) is equivalent to an alief in supernatural.

it feels like they're actually thanking something, so there must be something to thank, and therefore this is evidence of a supernatural higher power

Maybe I wasn't clear. Of course I understand logically that the target of gratitude does not exist in this particular case. (On an unrelated note, I hate it when people use fancy words for simple ideas.)

I'm perfectly fine with these empty pointers/referents

The conscious me is fine with them, too. It's the subconscious me who apparently wants to believe.

I've heard (sorry no source) that it takes three generations to make an atheist, which seems plausible to me.

Do you think that having some occasional moments of theist alief has a significant chance of making your life worse?

-2Nick_Tarleton14y

I'm not sure this is a meaningful question. "Alief" is a very fuzzy category.

0DaFranker14y

(Any examples from my comment? These are the simplest terms I know to accurately convey the relevant ideas, any help would be appreciated.) [...] Then it appears to me that your doubts / questions might be coming from somewhere else, as a first thought. My subconscious has no particular problem either, and doesn't appear to want to believe anything - it just runs its scripts, and I've seen none of them that are attempting to generate an explanatory belief-system to fill in missing nodes and empty referents of other emotional scripts. Of course, this is all assuming I'm not doing some sort of third-order motivated cognition, i.e. unknowingly deceiving myself about what constitutes evidence of me deceiving myself, and also that your mind works remotely similar to my own in these respects, which is itself a very shaky proposition. If your mind is automatically attempting to resolve the discrepancy of a missing target, which might equivocate to an alief in supernatural (or "fate") and eventually cause one (but still remains, so far, substantially different IMO), then my own next step would be... hmm, I started to write this down, and then realized that it relies on a very critical "Recompute Scripted Mental Behaviors" black-box skill that I trained at a young age, one that would probably take more reductionist skill than I have to properly describe and probably presents too much inferential distance at the moment. In fact, this realization is an important one that I should have made long ago, and it now explains quite a bit about the mysterious inferential distance I find popping up in various psychology-related topics. Anyway, on topic, my current impression is that your current mind configuration is not as "bad" as you seem to question/wonder/fear (insofar as you consider alief in supernatural entities to be "bad"), but rather that the complex and impenetrable interaction of various thought patterns is making your brain do strange things that might lead to some a

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Do I really not believe in God? Do you?

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Do I really not believe in God? Do you?

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