i don't believe.
i don't do this thing they call believing.
belief means you've made up you're mind. belief requires no evidence. sometimes belief intentionally contradicts evidence.
i find belief restrictive and troubling.
i chose a different method.
evaluating evidence. deciding if the evidence seems reasonable. asking. realizing what is impossible to know. not choosing what to think forever. observing.
does this make me an atheist, an agnostic, a weak atheist? i don't know. none of those words seem to fit. and my method is not just applied to huge questions such as "is there a god" but also "is capital punishment okay" "is it better to work or to beg."
i invite you to try this method and see if you prefer it to belief.
i don't do this thing they call believing.
belief means you've made up you're mind. belief requires no evidence. sometimes belief intentionally contradicts evidence.
i find belief restrictive and troubling.
i chose a different method.
evaluating evidence. deciding if the evidence seems reasonable. asking. realizing what is impossible to know. not choosing what to think forever. observing.
does this make me an atheist, an agnostic, a weak atheist? i don't know. none of those words seem to fit. and my method is not just applied to huge questions such as "is there a god" but also "is capital punishment okay" "is it better to work or to beg."
i invite you to try this method and see if you prefer it to belief.
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Will I take strawberry or chocolate ice cream? would be an example...
But there is a more important class of questions which I find are not neccesarily best dealt with rationaly. The could be called the questions of life.
How do I live my life right?
Do I truely love her?
Why is he hurting so much?
These are the questions pertaining us as humans, as individuals.
Asking these questions is what makes us human.
And the answers we find to these questions are what most marks us as individuals.
It is a personal experience for me that my rationality failed me with many of these questions. Evidence and rationality still provide a framework within which these questions are asked and answered, but it's been a personal experience of mine that rationality ultimately failed me there.
In it's place I would put awareness: Awareness of your self as in conciousness, and awareness of others as in empathy.
There is a remarkable book dealing with this: "The first Man" by Albert Camus. It's an autbiographical novel and unfortunately unfinished but still extremely powerfull. He says of himself that he was a monster for trying to live through rational understanding.