Who could change your beliefs?

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If I could change any belief I would, just to see how it is to think otherwise.



Robert Frost quote

One doesn't have to actually change a belief when speculations as to the consequences suffice.

Sand wrote:

Translate this...please...example?

Any belief has consequences. If you believe that fairies live beneath mushrooms or that God punishes evil acts or that Obama is genuinely acting for the benefit of the country instead of a select group of self interested financiers and you are horrified that this is not true then it is time to discover reality and change your beliefs. Or, on the other hand, each of these beliefs has consequences and if you are happy with the consequences after consideration then there is no need to change. Lots of people are happy to live in cloud cuckoo land.

I believe that I'll be a famous writer one day. This should work in my favor according to your standards.

Is it more logical to be happy and live in cuckoo land, or is it more logical to know the truth about yourself and deal with the consequences? What causes a belief to transform into reality? Could a belief change the outcome of your life?

I would never change my beliefs. I'm a pure Christian who has a good head on her shoulders. Why would I want anything else for myself?

I believe that I could never be a good Christian unless...Unless I'm an Essene Christian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essenes

http://essenes.net/~essenes/index.php?o ... Itemid=971

That depends. Becoming a famous writer has a few basic requirements. If you don't know grammar, don't have a decent vocabulary, have no concept what makes writing interesting, useful or well directed, and beyond that, have no idea how to get commercial areas interested in your output, you are probably screwed and will spend your life pissing and moaning about your great potential. But if you use your beliefs to remedy your lacks by looking at what you need to succeed you may have a ghost of a chance. There are surely quite a few talented writers who never become known and luck plays a great factor in success. If you don't buy a lottery ticket you are guaranteed not to win but buying the ticket is no guarantee of anything, whatever your belief.

Thanks Sand. So I do stand a chance...

Awesome...

There's no such thing as a belief without consequences.

Going back to the 'prayer for serenity' - I don't believe in free will, I don't believe there's anything that can be done any other way than it is, but, affirmations like that prayer are a mental health tool - ie. the emphasis isn't on 'change the things you can' when a person recites that prayer to themselves, its far more about the serenity to accept what they cant - its a prayer most often said by those who are suffering greatly in life and are tying not to beat themselves into nothingness by owning way more of their problems than they can bear in a healthy sense or intellectually even should claim responsibility for.

As for diversity of beliefs or beliefs different from your own - I know that yourself and reuvyn seem to believe in free will at the end of "Well, I could do something remarkably stupid - I just wouldn't" - that's the same as not having any free will in the opposite direction. If time is nothing more than thermodynamic relaxation from the big bang, modulated by dark energy and dark matter, and everything about us comes from a precedent - this is truly one of Heron's mechanical plays in its fullest essence. You don't have the choice to be logical or illogical, you don't have the choice whether to spend $100 on a new bird feeder or to donate it to the poor, what I'll have for lunch on January 23rd 2039 is already spoken for. I'm not endorsing solipsism so much as saying that you can relax - there's no meaningful communication on the matter. In the course of things though, of course free will aside, there are certain things people do to cope and affirmations are one of them whether they believe in them literally to the letter or more abstractly, I think these days for the most part its the later and the prayer for Grace is mostly self-affirmation with something of a flowery top-note.

ok tech, who could change your mind about free will?

reminder:

I didn't say what...

Who or whatever was meant to - since the beginning of time .

Please translate...

Our lives are held captive to matter, our minds are made up of DNA and nervous system circuity that we did not choose, concocted by two people who did not choose to have a kid or who did not choose to fall in life and it goes back as far as space time has been in existence. Everything is 1:1 in the universe, the same atom doesn't exist in two different places at the same time, every movement or action has cause from a precursory motion, and in that sense everything about our lives, literally, everything is completely predestined - our ups, our downs, our triumphs, our miseries, all the way down the most mundane details. That knowledge doesn't mean that we give in to naval gazing, that's not what makes us happy, we strive along our courses, impact those who we are supposed to impact, brush our teeth at the exact time per day that we were supposed to, throw lucky sevens in craps exactly when we were predestined to, absolutely nothing is a product of free will.

Therefore, if someone or something changed my mind on predestiny - it would be exactly the person or set of facts that were meant to since the beginning of time . Our lives our not our own, we can say that we have a sense of identity in our conscious selves but its more like our experiences in our own very bodies are on lease and we're really strapped into a rollercoaster bound, shackled, straightjacketed, can't move a muscle. That's why I have to argue though that just like there's no free will to better yourself beyond your genetic capacity and limits, there's also no free will to do better or worse than you will do since the amount of energy you posess at any given time, the mood your body puts you in based on autonomic turns from hereditary changes or from nutrition issues from the day before where what you ate or didn't eat was not your choice either - it's one of those concepts that seems to ride the razor's edge in that you will feel like you can make decisions on your own, you'll feel like in some ethical situation or another you could have gone either way but; if you had the *exact* same stimulus and triggers in your mind, nothing external changed, retesting the situation would be like playing a tape forward, rewinding it back, playing it forward, rewinding it back - the situation would be a perfect carbon copy of itself and always would yield the same result, just like watching a football game you may have DVR'd, it'll be the exact same game no matter how many times you watch it. We have an intuitive sense that yes, history is past thus it is written, what I'm suggesting is that the now and future are nothing more than a movie in progress or a continuation of a Heron play.

Simple answer: Your mom or dad?

I love your translation btw...

I have no idea where you picked up the concept that I believe in free will. I have consistently posted against this idea.