Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/76407/

Do you think belief is a choice, or a reaction to evidence?

Belief is, in my opinion, in no way a choice. You can't manufacture belief, but you can lie.

Could everyone choose to believe that, for example, 2+2=5 without changing our definitions of any of the symbols involved?

Short of brainwashing? No. I never would believe that, although I suppose if you resorted to torture or extraordinary social pressure, I might say I did without believing. Gaslight me enough, and I might start to wonder if maybe 2 plus 2 isn't 4 after all.

What about beliefs that can't be proven or disproven?

Subjective judgments can't be proven or disproven. (Tchaicovsky is better than John Cage! Says who? Says me!) Truth claims can.

We are told in the scriptures to believe in God and in Christ, but I have some friends and family members who say they just can't, like I just can't believe in fairies.

You have to consider the source. Hans Christian Andersen invites you to engage with a belief of sorts while reading the text. I think that your friends and family are acting in good faith. I can't, either. This expands on something Ms. Sheebs said,

You can't conclusively say there is no God on the basis of not being able to observe Him because of there is a critical assumption embedded in your reasoning which says that only observable things are real.

This is something of a red herring, I think. I think that love, Ronald Reagan, and Hong Kong are real, although I haven't directly observed them. However there is overwhelming evidence that all of these things (yes even abstractions) are real, as observable by indirect effects. I believe that there is no evidence for a supernatural Deity and a great deal of evidence against his or her favor. The difference between so-called weak and strong atheism is "I see no evidence for believing in God; therefore I do not believe in God" and "I am certain there is no God." A weak atheist could still logically conduct her life as if there were no God, just as a weak theist could and often does the reverse.

What can I say to them?

I think the best thing to say is to lay your cards on the table once, and then let them conduct their lives. I am not trying to de-program anyone (except perhaps my younger brother who never believed in God, ever, and I personally think he should live his life accordingly); pity and preaching and testifying can just drive apart valued relationships.

If belief can be forced, would that be a true or valid belief?

I think the example of everything from Soviet regimes to modern-day cults show the negative effects of extreme psychological duress to produce a desired belief. It's not valid, in that case.

Just some input from the other side of this situation. :-)

Sounds similar to this question, which boils down to, supposing that the reality is that there is no god, would you want to know it?

Similar, but a real difference. Like Portia, I'm the type of person who needs evidence. That said, evidence can come in lots of forms for me, and for a long time I simply didn't believe in the loving, involved God we were taught about in church. My feelings count as evidence just as legitimately as a TBM's, so that was the first thing that got me questioning. Anyway, it is an interesting topic.

I wonder what a God helmet feels like.

Just "came out" as a non-believer on Facebook. I wanted to see if my disbelief would stick. It has. Here's a Wallace Stevens canto to illustrate how I feel about the Dead Mother Problem.

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.