Originally posted by darkhorse
There are many 'potential' ideas for how things could be, and it is easy for the mind to seize on the idea it likes and fill in the holes, especially if said mind is an intelligent/creative one. Better to be brutally honest and let reality speak for itself, even if we do not like what reality is saying to us.
Is any mind, in the end, really capable of seizing onto and adopting a belief system that it doesn't in some sense "like"? Some minds might by nature tend to seek out the alien and the repellent, but, if the given b.s. (!) were entirely alien and repellent, then the mind would be incapable even of recognizing it as a b.s. Something about the b.s. must be attractive and familiar enough to engage the mind. Then, if the b.s. has sufficient dynamic force, or if the mind is sufficiently flexible or vulnerable, the mind might in the process of exploring or pretending to explore the b.s., find itself shaped by the b.s., in a sense become the b.s., or at least become its own version of the b.s. Equally, because no two individual minds or the understandings they reach can ever be absolutely identical, no one's b.s. can ever be absolutely identical to anyone else's b.s... perhaps suggesting hat even if I earnestly desired to believe the same thing that you believe, I could never actually manage to come to believe it, just as, try as you might, you could never get me to believe as you do. The very words could never mean the same things to each of us, could ever resonate the same, couuld ever take on the same shapes or priorities, no matter how fervently and synchronously we recited them together...
Or... you can't jump over your own shadow. Or the owl of Minerva flies at dawn - presumably fleeing the cats that were all gray at midnight. Or... it may be bullshit, but it works for me...
Or this is just one simplistic way, I suppose, of rendering the same problems that have concerned and perplexed philosophers, as well as physicists, mathematicians, and teenagers of all ages, for ages.
All the same, I think I know what you mean to say, and I respect it. I agree that the degree to which something makes us "comfortable" is unlikely to be a very good measure of its truth value, to say the least - unless the question of belief systems happens to be one of the chief exceptions to that general rule, perhaps for the reasons above. Or is affect really to be considered at all, good or bad, pro or con....
Hmmmm.... now I'm rambling, too, and giving further evidence, as if any were needed, to the proposition that, whether atheists or agnostics or theists or gnostics or animists or promiscuists, whether system traders or discretionary traders, swingers or scalpers or packers or CANSLIM positioners, prop firmers or SOHOers, profitable or unprofitable, newbies or vets, spritely young'uns or fat ol' bastards, we're clearly a bunch of space cadets...
have you just now realized the limits of words