I see many on here that make statements of who and or what they believe in,such as confucius being their god etc..

It makes no diff. to me what one believes in but i wonder if anyone conciders the >>>foundation<<< of their beliefs - takes into concideration "WHY" they beleive what they believe about who or what they think is worthy to be a "god"/Goddess/etc., in thier views?

After all - you need some type of reason and some type of faith to believe in anything you aspouse to be worthy of being held up as some entity that you concider worth worship or reverence.

Soooo - what is your foundation for believing the way that you do? - Or, if you don't have one, explain this also to me if you would so i can understand [using reason and logic] how you can justify your beliefs that for instance Micky Mouse is god.

Ok, heres my story...


I was brought up in a house with 2 protestant parents, but i was never christened.

My parents werent religious in the slightest, in fact, the only time i was ever at church, was when i attended a youth club there, and that was only for the free cookies and orange juice!!

From a very young age, around 6 upwards, i began arguing with other children in primary, over the mind not dying. I remember so clearly, feeling passionate about it, i just 'knew' that our soul could never die, just our body.

I know it sounds strange, but i dont know where my beliefs came from, i only know that they were always there, and still are. Ive never had any major religious/spiritual influences in regards to my family or friends. And i still to this day dont know why my belief is so strong.

Tribo,

I personally have no real commitments or leanings toward one spirituality or another. I do like to research various religions. I have my suspicions that we might possibly come back over and over. I assume that is the concept behind reincarnation. I dont know any of the specifics and whether or not it can be human to human only or animal to human or how the transference takes place. Some of this is based on a period of time that I worked in a hospital and what I saw. Just things that were unusual that every blue moon would occur. I didnt want to dwell on it though. I dont pretend to understand much beyond that.

THNX PL, So let me see if i understand you ok?

what i think your saying is your belief(s) is that you/we have a soul - correct? and i guess that is all you believe as of now - correct?

Or is there more to add to this? like this has lead you to accept the premise of a entity that produced this soul we have or - further believing in an afterlife of some kind? can you expand on this if you will? [a little bit?]

I think the foundation for my beliefs ultimately boils down to “my own perceptions”. My parent’s were “church goin’ christians” when I was very young, but evolved into a sort of “spiritualist” viewpoint by the time I finished grammar school. Then after I was on my own, I dabbled in several different belief systems. I had a few catalyzing incidents along the way, but eventually I just sort of “grew into” the realization that the only sensible foundation for any beliefs I might have or develop was my own perceptions. That’s not to say that I ignored everyone else’s opinions. Just that, if those opinions didn’t agree with what I perceived, then there was no reason to believe in them. And it’s not to say either that I don’t believe in anything that I can’t perceive. If it aligns with what I perceive and with the rest of the “belief system” I have evolved for myself, then that may be enough reason to believe in it. If it doesn’t, then there is no reason for me to believe in it at all.

so basically your "foundation" is being or is a Karmistic type of belief - correct? [at this point]

This would prob take a while to explain, but i will try summarise!

Firstly, after much searching in my life, i have learned that my beliefs sway towards the 7 principles of Spiritualism.

Yes, i believe we have a soul, and yes, i believe we all have, and come from the same essence of energy. I believe there is a higher place/dimension, that is our home, and that this is just place we come to to learn wat we need to learn.

I believe that the afterlife can be anything that is familiar, or wanted in our minds, cos in the afterlife, we have no body, just spirit....no eyes to see, no hands to feel etc,.. just our thoughts and feelings, our spirit.

I have encountered many things in my life to reinforce my belief in the afterlife, too many. I can be sensitive at times, and i know when my grandparents r around, particularly my grandad.

We can only believe wat we have 'felt' for ourselves.

Am I or others to take "perception" to mean your physical senses - sight, taste,touch, etc.?

If so then are you saying that this belief is what you concur through reason and logic [based on these perceptions] to be what you concider your "foundation"?

If so, do you reason where these perceptions you have faith in come from?

THNX PL, that is what i was really looking for -

ok K, care to elaborate on this at all?

I think I got things off on the wrong foot by using the wrong term. I could better have started my explanation by using the word “awareness” instead of “perception”. The difference may be slight, but very important. I would describe it like this: “one can be aware of perceptions, but one cannot perceive awareness”. So if I may, I’d like to use “awareness” from here on instead of “perception”, just because it is a more accurate term.

Not entirely. I consider that I can be aware of other things that are not strictly bound to “the five sense”. For example, I can be aware of my own memories and thoughts and decisions. I can also be aware of my location relative to my body. (Usually about an inch behind the bridge of my nose. ) So yes, it includes input from the classical “five senses”, but is not limited to that exclusively.

I would say that my awareness is at the foundation of my beliefs. So I think "Yes" is the best answer to your question.

This is where I realized I’d gotten of on the wrong foot and why I had to replace “perception” with “awareness”. Perceptions are pretty much limited to the “material world”, which is not the case with awareness.

But awareness is the defining quality of “me”. Without awareness, there is no “me”. So I don’t see it as having anything to do with “faith”. It’s not even an axiom or a postulate or a hypothesis. It’s a definition. “I am awareness” is as true a statement of equality as just about anything that I can think of. (“I am a viewpoint” is almost as good, but it lacks the concept of active participation.)

(I just realized that this is at the heart of my difference of opinion with JB. If you’re reading this Jeannie, make a note.)

The premise underlying all these statements and subsequent questioning is that people HAVE to believe in something.

No--they do not. It's just that humans have a tendency to attribute meaning to natural occurrences that take place around them.

Belief is something that occurs after the attribution of meaning to an event. It is a sequence of validation that occurs solely within the human mind; it is, in other words, completely abstract.

Some people live almost wholly in belief and will think, for example, that solid objects are only there because they believe in them. In general terms, this is mental illness.

As non-ill individuals who place a value on logic and rationality, we know that the tree is really there, that the chair is really there, and that there's really a car hurtling towards us so we'd better get the hell out of the way.

Therefore we have this objective evidence that the universe exists regardless of our personal beliefs pertaining to that existence, or the nature of that existence. There could be a reason--there could be a creator--there could be some underlying rationale for this universe of ours and everything in it, but at best each of us has only part of the whole story, and a very small part at that.

I try to get along without belief as much as possible. There are reasons for this that simply take too long to explain, and at any rate I don't actually suppose that you want to hear the story of my life or how I arrived at my present state of mind.

I hope this is helpful to you in some way. yours in Chaos, Scarlett

Im intrigued by ur post...especially the above quote.

Its only in looking back, as an adult, i can start to pinpoint when i first remember being aware of beliefs. That was an early age, so reading wat u wrote, i am curious about wat may have happened to me before the age of 6?

Before the age of 6? Well... I don't know you personally, but you were probably just a little heathen, like most kids.

Kids tend to accept what's happening around them without needing to validate events or attribute meaning to them. That's why you see, for example, that in some sort of disaster kids will be relatively calm even if the adults around them are freaking out.

Do you "believe" all the statements you just made?

If yes - then is this not what your "foundation" of truth for you is?

""The premise underlying all these statements and subsequent questioning is that people HAVE to believe in something.""


Evidentally you personally ""believe"" in your above statement or you wouldn't have made it correct?

There fore unless you give me more to work with I will take it that this is your foundation of truth by which you live by.

1faith
Pronunciation: \ˈfāth\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural faiths \ˈfāths, sometimes ˈfāthz\
Etymology: Middle English feith, from Anglo-French feid, fei, from Latin fides; akin to Latin fidere to trust — more at bide
Date: 13th century
1 a: allegiance to duty or a person : loyalty b (1): fidelity to one's promises (2): sincerity of intentions
2 a (1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2): complete trust

3: something that is believed especially with strong conviction ; especially : a system of religious beliefs <the Protestant faith>;



As you can see Sky, faith can be had without the belief of something spiritual - although it is normally used in that way. for you then it means - #3 first part - 3: something that is believed especially with strong conviction - is this correct as to your statements?

That's like the guy on another forum telling me that I could not live without belief. I told him in a lighthearted manner that "belief doesn't need a champion" and he blew up at me, then started trying to have me kicked off the forum. Though he claims to be an atheist, his beliefs are in fact very important to him, and therefore he assumes that everyone must be like him, and wastes vast amounts of energy trying to prove it.

You're over-intellectualizing. If you didn't need belief to be born and live into adulthood, you are in error by supposing that you need it now, or that anyone else does.

(If you actually READ what I wrote, then you wouldn't have to ask me these things.)

Yes, lots of people, nearly everyone, has belief of some sort. Almost everyone alive has a can opener, too. Can openers are handy, but obviously we can get along without them in a pinch.

I'll repeat the main premise behind my words, which does not involve my belief, or a foundation of any kind, but only an observation of fact in so-called "reality"--

A person who supposes that belief is necessary for things to exist is what we typically call "mentally ill".

If I was to die right now, these words that I'm typing would continue to exist until someone came and turned off the computer. This has nothing to do with "belief" and everything to do with "reality".

A person who is sick in the head in a certain way thinks that if he were to die right now, you, me, the computer, his home, and basically the entire universe will all disappear. (Don't suppose I'm accusing you of this! I'm illustrating a point about belief only.)

Reality is not a belief, and does not depend on belief--or rather, if it does, it is not dependent on my own personal belief.

If belief DOES sustain reality, then I would have to opine (not BELIEVE, lol) that some higher or more advanced kind of belief is what sustains it.

But then on the other hand I would not have to care, which pretty much sums up my foundations in this regard. There may be something higher than me, or there may not; either way, I don't care and am not really interested. That is not a foundation of anything except uncaringness as far as belief is concerned.

Do the above statements involve "belief"...? No; they don't. I can think of these words and type them out, not because I BELIEVE that I can, but because at some point I learned the knack of it. If belief was involved, it was at the outset, when I believed that I would like to learn how to string words together and then type them, but even if I didn't believe that I could, if someone beat me every day until I learned how to write and type, I would still learn. (Thank goodness that wasn't the case, ya know?)



There is no foundation of truth by which I live. I live because I live, and I don't want to die. I avoid death not because of belief, but because it's natural for a living organism to do so.

Belief arises after the human mind attributes meaning to natural occurrences, and then attempts to validate the supposed meaning of those occurrences by repetition and verification from other humans.

Whether I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow or not, or whether I live to see it rise or not, it will surely rise. If you say that the sun rises because I believe it will, I think you are assigning rather more responsibility to me and importance to my whims than I want or deserve. xoxoxo