It is more reasonable....

Well, if that's what you want to believe, then that's what you want to believe.

Actually, I believe it because I accept it as truth.

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

The sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him; because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.

He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it; he has committed it already in his heart. If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action.

A train, here, is a train of explosive leading from a detonator to a mine. Someone sitting on a completely unreasonable belief is sitting on a time bomb. The apparently harmless, idiosyncratic belief of the Catholic Church that one thing may have the substance of another, although it displays absolutely none of its empirical qualities, prepares people for the view that some people are agents of Satan in disguise, which in turn makes it reasonable to destroy them. Our beliefs help to create the world in which our descendants will live. Making ourselves gullible or credulous, we lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them, and that means 'sinking back into savagery'

Ok, so now my question is who are you to tell me whether I believe carefully or not?

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Ok, so now my question is who are you to tell me whether I believe carefully or not?

Obligation, again.
It is your obligation to believe carefully.

It is your obligation to inquire and test things.
Again, read my story.

Faith leads us nowhere.

Is it okay then to believe that "Person P has the spirit of devil within?"
It's the same faith.

You are so frustrating! Does nothing I say to you sink in? You continually tell me what I should do. What I should believe, how I should believe. Why? What gives you that right?

It sinks in that you have the right to believe what you want to believe.

But it still remains: People have the obligation to reason carefully.

It's foolish of you to believe in something so unlikely. Just as foolish as it is to believe that the roulette wheel will land on 34.

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You are so frustrating! Does nothing I say to you sink in? You continually tell me what I should do. What I should believe, how I should believe. Why? What gives you that right?

It sinks in that you have the right to believe what you want to believe.

But it still remains: People have the obligation to reason carefully.

It's foolish of you to believe in something so unlikely. Just as foolish as it is to believe that the roulette wheel will land on 34.

It is not your place to determine what is foolish for others

It is more reasonable to believe there is a man hiding in the bushes outside your house than to believe in a deity
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It is not your place to determine what is foolish for others

But it is apparently your place to impose your egalitarian moral paradigm onto others.
Hyppocracy is fun isn't it?

Doktor S,

Show me one time where I have called your beliefs a derogatory name. Show me one time I have told you that you are foolish for what you believe. Or for that matter, show me where Intrepid has done it.

No one is forcing anything on anyone here. Everyone participating in these threads does it of their own free will.

And you think this because? You think you are right and I am wrong? It's foolish of me? I don't gamble.