Wednesday, July 11, 2012

A Belief Unlike Other Beliefs


Those who do believe in God do so in one of two ways: either they believe in a way that is different from the rest of their beliefs, or they believe in a way that is the same as the rest of their beliefs. The latter are in error. They simply are, I cannot conceive of any way that they are not mistaken short of God having personally revealed himself to them. Because we believe in the things that we believe in because we have encountered them or because they have been recorded by people who have encountered them (history and science) and these records can be scrutinized and relative degrees of reliability can be discovered. God, on the other hand, is not known in either of these ways. If someone believes in God in this way, he does himself a disservice: he has not experienced what it is really like to be religious. He just happens to believe in an additional science.

For those who believe in a way that is different from the rest of their beliefs, well, now all we have is linguistic similarity. Because if this belief is different from all other things called beliefs, we can always choose to call it something else, so as to make it plain how distinct this kind of belief is.

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