andrewducker | Belief

It would have been more instructive if you'd narrowed this down to adult life. Most kids believe in a god, because they're taught to.

You're dating yourself there. We're now beyond the tipping point where most parents don't believe in God.

I was never taught to believe in God as a child...

My parents were both lapsed, and didn't bring me up as Christian, but didn't not if that makes sense. I went to CofE schools, and the occasional cousin's christening, so pretty much beleived in Christ by default until I was an adult.

I think Steve's poll would be interesting.

Cheers.

Quite possibly. I was born in ~~the Middle Ages~~ 1960, after all.

But my initial point remains valid, I would argue.

For that statement alone, you should feel blessed that you live in the UK.

Possibly--but I got myself transferred from the local CofE to a further away secular school when was 7, in large part because I couldn't stick the religiosity.

Ergo, from the age of 7, I know I've not believed, before that doesn't really count.

Believe in god is one thing.
How many kids adhere to a belief system?

Sorry, how is "I believe in.." not a belief system?

What I'm asking for is the poll to exclude those childhood beliefs burned into us by society/parents/whatever.

I mean that there is a difference between believing in what a religion teaches and practicing its rites and rules.

Most children do not follow the full set of rites and rules of a religion until they are past a given age. In some religions that age is marked by a ritual. In others it is not.

I agree with this.

I deliberately excluded the time where my mother's decrees that God would listen & related admonishments held any weight.

I know I was formally questioning religion when I was 'trained' for my first communion aged 7. I know I have not believed since.

The previous period I do not remember my beliefs, but don't think it's hugely relevant as I may have also believed in the Tooth Fairy.

I'm not quite sure about my answer to the first question. I've only ever been a Christian or an atheist, but my Christianity has evolved and changed substantially over time, even though it has the same name, so I don't know whether it can terribly accurately described as a single belief system.

Does it feel like you'd be able to be a member of the same sect, or would you have to convert from one to another? Because the former would seem like a single belief _to me_, while the latter would feel like two separate beliefs.

Hrm. Well, I've been both Roman and Anglo-Catholic, but I don't really feel as though the difference there is that significant; For the last few years I received in both, and would continue to do so if I ever went back to the church. Far more significant (to me) than what church I belong to is my conception of God is/means, and that's what changed, depite remaining in the A-C church until recently.

I think the likelihood is that if I go back my concept will be closer to deist than it has been in the past, but catholicism is in some way "home" for me.

Which is, presumably the difference between "Church as originator of Truth" and "Church as social club for people that believe similar things."

Not exactly no. A lot of what makes catholicism 'home' is the ritual, which is really neither of those things, although a bit of it is providing a route to truth which suits my way of travelling. Another thing is the "Weeelllll, it's ineffable, innit" approach that a lot of scholarly catholics take, which fits reasonably well with a more deist perspective.

Yes, this :-) Especially as before getting to the point I'm at now I had my fundie creationist heartwringing happy clappy hellfire jesus is my boyfriend glossolalia slain in the spirit worship bands with drumkits baptist phase!

Oh, and where you place a strong agnostic on question 3?

That's why I worded it the way I did :->

Do you adhere to a supernatural belief system?

Becuase, in my experience, agnostics do not. They don't declare them impossible (as strong atheists do), but nor do they adhere to one.

True. I beleive:

A supernatural belief system is illogical, but not impossible.
AND
An atheist belief system is illogical, but not impossible.

I'd go with that.

I believe that it is possible that some being outside of all we understand (and possibly all we can understand) created our universe and interferes with it as they wish.

But without proof I find it unreasonable to actively believe this.
And without proof I find it unreasonable to declare it impossible.

Therefore I stay strongly agnostic - but generally act (day-to-day) as if I were atheistic.

That's Agnostic. Strong Agnostism (as I follow it) is the beleif that proof is probably impossible too.

Negative proof is definitely impossible. We can only prove that we have not found the magic password to turn off the holodeck _yet_, not that we are not living in The Matrix.

That do you?

Almost. Even if we _did_ find the password and turned off the holodeck, how would you know that it was not just the programmers in the Matrix messing about with you.

Well, we'd know that our original world had a God, but we wouldn't know if they were The God.

The problem being a need for a definition of "God"...

The problem being a need for a definition of "God"...

I like "culturally postulated supernatural being", myself. It lets you include anima and the Buddha without including psychics and UFOs, which conveniently matches up with the most-common definition of "religion".

Ooh, how's about Ignosticism?

Just found that.

Interesting one! Thanks!

I would call this position atheist, not an agnostic.

You don't believe that the answer is impossible, and you don't believe that we *don't* know. You find it unreasonable to believe in the supernatural: that makes you not an agnostic.

At the same time, unless I've missed something, you do not believe in any god(s). Or in fairies or in psychics or in alien abductions or the tooth fairy or any other religious-but-too-unpopular-to-get-protection belief.

This makes you "not a theist".
Which is to say, "an atheist".

You're not a "God cannot exist" atheist, but that doesn't matter. Nothing about your beliefs in the possibility of gods changes your current lack of belief in any of them.

I would call this position atheist, not an agnostic.

Your second clause doesn't really follow from your first. Most atheists and a great many theists are also agnostic.

And there we get into the "strong" atheism versus "weak" atheism debate, which I've been in far too many times before. Where weak atheists have no-belief-in-God and strong atheists have belief-in-no-God.

And whichever one I use to mean "atheist" one of the other types will pop up and contradict me. So I prefer to use agnostic, so that I am describing my state of knowledge (unknown) rather than the universe.

And I don't just find it unreasonable to believe in the supernatural - I find it unreasonable to believe in anything that lacks proof. Which includes, say, various conspiracy theories.

"strong" and "weak" are both bad, misleading terms, because in both cases they concede the framing of the argument to imply that there is a *reason* to "assert nonexistence*, or a functional difference between nonbelief and assertion that other people are wrong to believe.

And, reall,y I'm not saying you can't call this position agnostic. I'm simply saying, I'd call it atheistic:
Since you don't actively believe that one or more of the postulated supernatural things are affirmatively true, you're not a theist. To not be a theist is to be an atheist. Full stop.

If atheist, to you, means "One who does not positively believe in God." then what's your word for "One who positively believes God does not exist."?

"a meaningless distinction that falsely claims a difference between unbelief and nonbelief"

But as long as you're incorrectly conceding the rhetorical possibility of "believe in a negative", I'd call that an atheist.

"What do you call someone who likes football?"
"A fan"
"But what if they like football AND really like Man U"
"They're a fan."
"But those things are different!"

You may find it meaningless - I find it incredibly important.

I cannot disprove the existence of God, and I would find it insulting and inapprorpriate for someone to think I was insisting that God definitely did not exist. And so I do not use the word atheist about myself, because that it how people seem to use it.

Out of curiosity, I wonder why you would find it insulting / inappropriate to insist that God did not exist?

I can understand why it would not be scientifically verifiable, but in a world where it's acceptable to claim existence of a being based on the evidence of select texts, I don't see why it should be insulting to strongly argue that God definitely doesn't exist.

That is to say, I cannot prove my assertion that God doesn't exist, but I am more than happy to go toe to toe with those who are willing to insist that he does and to argue with equal fervour.

I would find it insulting to _my_ intelligence, not to the other people. I would not want to be associated with that view, and I correct people who say that I believe it.

I'm happy to argue that there's no reason to think God exists, and that assertions that he does are without grounds. Just not to assert that God is impossible.

Strong Agnostic and Week Atheism and Agnostic Atheism are not incompatible.

I say that believing that none of the "culturally postulated supernatural beings" are real is as irrational as believing that one is.

Gah! That's the third time I've misspelled "weak" today.

I say that believing that none of the "culturally postulated supernatural beings" are real is as irrational as believing that one is.

You can say this all you want. You will still be wrong.

(Hint: the underpants gnomes, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and God all have exactly the same evidence in favour of them and the exact same track record on influencing the real world.)

See my last blog entry :P

the underpants gnomes: Culturally understood to be responsible for theft of underwear. Large scale inexplicable underwear theft not reported. I'm happy to believe in non-existence.

The tooth fairy, Santa Claus: Culturally understood to be responsible swapping teeth placed under pillow for rewards, and providing stockings full of presents. Others have since made plausible claims for personal responsibility. I'm happy to believe in non-existence.

God: Culturally understood to be outside the universe as is and laws of physics . Responsible for many things such as maintenance of an afterlife, creation of the universe, and possibly small scale tinkering with the day to day running of the universe. There is no real argument that can be made using my day to day experiences that contradicts these. I'm not happy to believe in non-existence.

You appear to have a very, very different "cultural understanding" of God than most people who assert its existence. You've gone as far as the most competent Christians have, by redefining God to be an undetectable, irrelevant, meaningless construct, but you fail in two respects:

1) "lack of belief" is not a positive statement. Attempting to mischaracterise "a lack of belief" as a positive assertion in nonexistence is, in and of itself, either intellectually incompetent or intellectually dishonest. Bald is not a hair colour. "Not collecting stamps" is not a hobby. Lacking assertive belief is not assertive belief.

2) You, like them, have forgotten about the gravity gremlins, the flying spaghetti monster, the invisible pink unicorn, the tooth fairy, and an infinite number of other, evidenceless, undetectable, meaningless, purporseless constructs, who have identical support to your assertion of God. As long as you're going to alter the culturally postulated God into a meaningless, irrelevant, untestable state, you have to accept that belief in it is a utterly irrational as belief in *anything else anyone can make up that's equally as untestable*.

Edited 2009-07-10 17:16 (UTC)

This.

I;d be with the person that says we should narrow this to adulthood.

And youu need to classify supernatural beliefs. I said yes - cos as a kid, though not religious I had all sorts of weird ideas about how the world/universe worked - and I bet most of those who happily ticked 'never believed' did too. They were fined into something workable/consistent as I got older.

About 12 I went all the way from "nothing really exists" to "and it doesn't matter (just keep [mostly]acting like it does)" in one afternoon. Not really changed that basis since then.

You been reading Supersense by any chance?? if not, I recommend it.

I guess I'd say I'm agnostic (as there's really no way to positively prove or disprove the existence of something outside of what we can perceive) but with strong atheistic tendancies (Invisible Sky Guy doesn't strike me as being terribly likely, or as a useful model for finding out how the universe works for that matter).

I did "hang" with a United Church lunch group for a year in junior high and found the social aspect pleasant but the theology dull and self-contradictory... and spent only a few services at Anglican churches before the parents (Mom's United, Dad nominally Anglican but seems uncomfortable with the whole idea pro- or anti-) gave it up as a bad idea.

-- Steve is one to "live and let live" on this, though, unlike the Crusading types. (Specifically including Dawkins in this category, along with the mullahs and televangelists.)

I cannot choose any of the options above primarily because of the "system" approach. My spiritual beliefs are too vague for that. Strong, but vague. Same beliefs I've had my whole life though, and which I've never doubted. "Accuracy" is not a term that I really feel applies. It works for me. *Shrug*

I did think about asking how specific people's beliefs were. Some other day :->

Not very, in my case! *gryn*

Also I'm delighted by your icon; I read Sheldon comics and that one in particular I adored.

I am interpreting "At some point I did not adhere to a supernatural belief system - and I currently don't" as a superset of "I have never adhered to any supernatural belief system".

You are interpreting correctly!

The question about the supernatural only really makes sense from a philosophical (as opposed to methodological) naturalist perspective.

At the time the Bible was written and before (and for a lot of afterwards) there was no idea of natural things and supernatural things. Everything was thought of as being a work of God, although some works were 'greater works' than others. In fact when English translators include the word 'miracle' in their translations what the original Greek actually says is 'greater work'.

The idea of a kind of clock work world which is 'natural', where possibly a God might come in like a kind of wizard, zap something, and have done his bit of 'supernaturalism' isn't a Biblical idea at all.

Many Christians today will think in terms of natural and supernatural because most Christians don't know very well what the Bible says, and because they import a lot of the philosophy of the culture around them. However your question doesn't fit if you know what the Bible says and what the church has historically believed (i.e. what orthodox Christian belief has been).

Of course, one can define "natural" as "the set of things which can be understood by investigation, hypothesis and experimentation", which will then provide us with "natural laws". "Supernatural" entities would then be left as the things which are capable of acting in ways outside of this - modifying the natural laws, etc.

This would, of course, merely mean that our natural laws were a side-effect of a larger set of natural laws which we do not have direct access to (as the inhabitants of The Sims do not have direct access to our natural laws) - the larger set would still be "natural" to the beings that inhabited that domain, not to us.

I do enjoy that kind of thinking rather a lot :->

So does someone have supernatural beliefs if they think that there are things that cannot be understood by investigation, hypothesis, and experimentation? That would include quite a lot of things that would not normally be thought to be 'supernatural' (e.g. one off events, multiverses, laws that we cannot in practice investigate, etc).

By extension - would aliens sufficiently more advanced than us (such that would could not detect them by investigation, hypothesis, and experimentation) would be 'supernatural' under this definition?

Usually natural is tied to 'physical'/material. So aliens are natural, but God is supernatural because God (apart from Jesus at least) is not 'physical' but spirit (i.e. non material stuff).

Edited 2009-07-10 15:20 (UTC)

yeah, i got stuck on "supernatural belief system", and after reading the comments so far even more so. are agnosticism and atheism supernatural belief systems in this context? i consider myself areligious, but would probably classed as agnostic (no reliable evidence for or against = NULL). i consider atheism a religion of sorts.

If we could, theoretically, understand them then they're natural. If they are beyond the theoretical possibility of investigation, then they are supernatural.

And Clarke's Third Law definitely applies :->

I'm not really sure what the bounds of theoretically means here.

I think I'd say that the works of God are theoretically understandable, but not understandable in practice (due to time constraints, limitations of human intelligence, etc.)

I like Carrier's position that supernatural beliefs involve ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities. See Saunt Eliezer's article.

By this definition, God is supernatural, aliens aren't (unless they're somehow not made of stuff).

That is indeed a good definition.

It's pretty hard to know what Carrier actually means [I read a fair amount of his blog post, but it is (this all his blog posts) extremely long and the content seems to mostly be at the beginning], because if he's going to come up with a definition of natural that uses the term mental, then he needs to define what mental actually means otherwise his definition is not very useful because it is either terribly incomplete or hides within it what I suspect is a circular argument (by making the reader assume certain things about the nature of mentality).

Perhaps you're right, and under his definition aliens are supernatural if they're somehow not made of stuff, but I imagine there are quite a lot of people who would think of aliens as not being entirely reducible to stuff (if by stuff we mean the kind of things physicists study) but wouldn't think that that makes them supernatural. Perhaps it ought to - although it is confusing to have the term used in quite a different way to how people would use it generally.

If by "aliens" you mean "creatures from a different planet" then they'd be made of stuff in the same way that we are. Why would aliens be any different?

I think that part of the difference here is that we are constrained by the laws of physics. Aliens will also be constrained by said laws of physics. They may well have a better grasp of them, allowing them to do more impressive things (just as we do, compared to our 19th century ancestors), but we aren't supernatural compared to them, just better at working with nature.

God, however, is presumably capable of changing those laws - and is not bound by them. God is outside of, and above of, the natural system which God has created. Thus super-natural.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. My second paragraph is following on from the first.

I mean that aliens are not reducible to stuff in the sense that their minds might not be 'reducible to stuff' unless mentalness is ultimately reducible to stuff, which is completely unknown.

Carrier's definition of supernatural has absolutely nothing to do with outside of a system which God might have created. It's about the nature of mentality.

BTW I think this is a good example of how either Carrier's definition is not very good, or (more likely) 'supernatural' is being used without being properly defined (where really it means 'things I don't think exist').

Edited 2009-07-11 08:59 (UTC)

I would consider God to be outside of the laws of nature if I believe in God. And therefore supernatural.

OK, but that's not what Carrier means by supernatural at all, and Christians wouldn't (or shouldn't) even think in terms of the supernatural.

So I guess it goes to show that the term supernatural is not actually that useful for having a productive discussion as it means entirely different things to different people.

It's misleading (or just plain confusing) in the way it frames the debate, and leads to assumptions about the position of the other people in the debate.

That would be "language" for you...

So if an alien existing in this universe is not supernatural, but the creator who can change those laws¹ is supernatural, then an alien who created the Big Bang would be supernatural from our perspective, but not from his own (and indeed he might think of the alien who created his big bang or whatever as supernatural but again that alien wouldn't)?

So, for you, supernatural is a kind of placeholder here for the thing outside of the 'laws' of the system? An AI living in the matrix would be natural for it, but Neo not being bound by the rules of the matrix due to an exploit (or a programmer on the outside looking in) would be supernatural?

¹ another term that is misleading

Absolutely.

Seems to be the standard definition of the word:
"of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe ; especially : of or relating to God or a god, demigod, spirit, or devil"
"departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature"

What I'm trying to get at is whether it's system specific. If I make an AI and run it in an AI world I control, am I supernatural from the AI's perspective?

What about the example of Neo? He's not the creator, but he found some buffer overflows in the implementation of his world. Is he supernatural?

So the term supernatural for you does not have all that much to do with the nature of stuff, but the degree of control over a system?

A problem with viewing it in that way is that it doesn't seem to say very much, or at least doesn't say what atheists tend to want it to say. If I create an AI that doesn't make me supernatural, it just means the AI is incapable (in practice or in theory) of reaching out to determine things about the stuffness of the higher level (or prior) domain in which I live. It becomes more of a statement about cause and the inability to determine things.

Similarly "of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe" is a pretty crappy definition. I would assume that you, like me, consider there to be things which exist beyond the visible universe, but if you wrote a astronomical paper about such things you'd be laughed out of town for using the term 'supernatural'.

The second definition isn't very useful either. Lots of things have departed from what is usual or normal so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature, but then the laws have been expanded as we've understood them. So the issue has been limitation of knowledge again, not that the things are actually 'supernatural' whatever that means.

It seems like to me that some things will forever remain outside of the ability of humans to determine (and may be theoretically outside of our ability to determine, if they're outside of our light cone for instance), but it would be silly to say that makes them 'supernatural'.

at least doesn't say what atheists tend to want it to say.

It doesn't?

It seems to capture what most people think of as supernatural events - i.e. spooky ones which act in ways we would not normally consider possible.

To go back to a previous comment of mine - we live within a system of "natural laws" - if God, or other supernatural beings exist then they do not obey those laws - they are above/beyond them. To an AI, the creatures which created its "artificial" universe are as Gods. To me, a being which can tweak the laws of physics to its whim, or ignore them entirely, is a god.

I think Carrier's argument boils down to saying that substance dualism, if true, defines supernatural things (human souls/spirits, as well as gods).

To me, "mental" means "stuff I experience in my mind", and I'm pretty familiar with that, even if I don't understand how it occurs. Similarly, I'm not aware that substance dualists themselves have a watertight definition of "mental", yet that doesn't stop people from being dualists.

I don't think Carrier has implicitly assumed that minds arise from matter (if that's what you mean by assuming certain things about the nature of mentality), he's just said that if there are minds which don't, that's what makes them supernatural.

But hasn't the church (or parts of it) observed that there are regularities in the universe, and that we can understand them, and further concluded that the best explanation for these two facts is God? In that case, it seems even the church could talk of things which fitted into those regularities, and things which did not. That seems a pretty close fit to what the rest of us call natural and supernatural.

Yes, people would see a difference between the things that God generally does (like the creation of new life in babies) and the things he does rarely (like the resurrection of the dead), but they wouldn't see them as being in two stark categories like natural and supernatural.

A christians can use the terms natural and supernatural to talk about the things that God generally does and the things he does rarely, but the terms have a different meaning than what the Christian means by them even if they broadly refer to similar classes of thing (although arguably they don't if we accept Carrier's position above).

So while the terms might be useful to have a common language to talk about approximately the same collections of things, the terms import ideas that the Christian wouldn't (or rather shouldn't) hold to.

Sorry if this has been covered - I couldn't find it - but tell me the definition of supernatural you are using then I'll answer the poll xx

Outside of the laws of nature. God, for instance, would presmably be able to ignore gravity, the speed of light, the inverse square law, etc. if God so wished.

Although I answered the final question with >99% confidence, I did want to clarify what I mean by that. I am not >99% confident that everything I believe at present is accurate. I am sure that there are things about the God in whom I believe which I do not know or have misunderstood. There may be things that I need to change my mind about, and places where my understanding needs to develop. But I am absolutely confident in the God in whom I have placed my trust.

"Adherence" is perhaps not the right word for the way I feel/believe. I have always had a sense, going right to my core, that there is some sort of omnipresent figure that most religions would call "God" and most atheists would call "supernatural". But my belief is not terribly specific, and those things that I do believe are not part of any religion with which I was brought up; I don't believe in a God that is interventionist or directive in hir behavior, and I don't anthropomorphize God to the extent that most of the people I know who are religious do.

I still believe in what I'd call God for lack of a better term though. As to what "God" means, YMMV.

Good poll.

When I was a child (in the south of England, in the 1970s), Christian belief was considered not only to be the default but the only option. My parents considered themselves CofE (in the ultra-weak sense of attending church only for births, deaths and marriages, and not even for major church festivals) and never questioned the possibility of lacking religion. My education was within a Christian context (state primary school, public secondary school); it was assumed that you celebrated Christmas, Easter and the Harvest Festival. I attended Cubs and Scouts, went to far too many St. George's Day parades and church parades, and listened some pretty lousy sermons (the Methodists were generally worse than the United Reformed).

When I was about thirteen, I had something of an anti-Damascene conversion. I realised that I didn't actually believe any part of Christian dogma; I could believe that there might have been a Jesus of Nazareth, but the origins of the Bible meant that it was exceeding unlikely that there was any truth in its accounts of him. In short, the Bible could only be taken as allegory at best. The existence of any sort of supernatural being was so deeply implausible (and the prayers that invoked him so close to the sort of crawling parodied by the Pythons) that I couldn't see how any rational person could believe in one. Wish fulfillment at best.

Or, to put it more succinctly:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I was also born in the South of England, in 1972, and I never believed. A fair number of my compatriots of the time seem to have felt likewise.

There were celebrations, but they seemed to be entirely rite, with no actual belief involved.

You can't be sure that your beliefs are accurate. They're beliefs. Anyone who didn't tick the last option is a) wrong, b) deluded, c) irrational or d) a monkey who can't use a mouse properly. (I might be persuaded to make exceptions for people who ticked the second one, on a case-by-case basis.) The use of the word 'belief' clearly implies irrationality, because beliefs are irrational! Belief in anything is irrational, because the word 'belief' implies, at least to me, that you don't have proof for it.

Edited 2009-07-10 17:47 (UTC)

You can't be sure that your beliefs are accurate.

Equally, what proof do you have that any of the people responding to this actually exist?

Of course I can't be _certain_ that my beliefs are accurate. I can merely be confident that they match with my observations of the universe and logical hypotheses based thereon. That's as good as it's going to get, and good enough for me to be _near_ certain, and to act as if they were true outside of philosophical discussions of this nature.

But do we ever have proof for anything? I believe the sun will rise tomorrow, or that gravity will continue to apply tomorrow, but I don't have proof. I do, however, have probability, though that might also be questionable (what if I believe in probability?)

I have nothing to add to the discussion, but I would love to be able to sit down and discuss beliefs with a religious person? I don't think I've actually had the chance to learn and discuss at a personal level since I was 15 and had Mrs Emami for RE. The internet is, frankly, crap at this because any attempt at finding stuff out assumes you need converting.

I recommend theology degrees for such discussions. ;)

I have to caveat my answers, since I went to a CofE primary school, but stopped believing in God when I was nine or ten.

As far as I am concerned, God is a human construct; I don't believe we need to invent God to understand or explain the universe. Indeed, inventing supernatural powers is such a cop out.

I also went to a CofE school when I was young, but I never believed.

It is interesting - I certainly took part in the rituals and went to services and so on; but I grew up in a distinctly non-religious household (mother non-practicing Jewish, father not much of anything but CofE at a push by way of upbringing) and was taught to be questioning and sceptical. As I young child I am sure I must have believed, but once I seriously thought about it - and as I learned about biology and geology and science generally, lost that belief - no trauma at all, same as Father Christmas...

Interesting. It sounds to me like you're assuming you believed rather than remembering believing. Why do you assume that?

I know I believed in God as a young child, because that is what school and teachers taught me; I can't remember when I stopped believing, but it was around the age of ten.

But I am not sure that simply blindly accepting what one is taught is really believing: there is no real choice or decision for a five or six year old. That comes later!

Aaah. My teachers told me about God, but it didn't make me believe.

I wonder why.

Didn't answer the last. I follow Model Agnostism (Specifically, Wilsonian Postmodernism via RAW), and there's no option for rejecting belief as an operant.

Also, I see with interest that the atheist anthill has been poked with a stick. Don't do that. They don't like it. ;}P>

I'm not sure what I believed when I was a kid. I remember coming up with the idea that whatever anyone believed, was true for that person. Ie. if you believed in reincarnation, you'd be reincarnated, or if you believed in heaven, you'd go to heaven, etc. But I don't remember what I personally believed at that time. There was a point later on when I realized that I did not believe in Christianity, or in a god... which sort of implies that I did believe it before then, but I'm not sure. Yet I did believe in Santa Claus at one time, and the Easter Bunny, so does that count as a belief system?

I'm certain that at least one of my beliefs is wrong, but I don't know which, so I continue treating all of them as if they were right.

I'm not quite sure where that puts me on your last question. I went for the middle option, because the final option is simultaneously too weak (in level of certainty) and too strong (in scope) for my position.

I was brought up as a JW and as a kid I definitely believed. As I grew older I still believed but didn't like a lot of it. The whole 'living forever on a paradise Earth' scared the crap out of me and would induce feelings of anxiety and panic. I'm not entirely sure why. Probably because I couldn't stand the thought of having to spend an eternity with only the rest of the congregation. While they weren't bad people they weren't much fun. It sounded so dull and boring. I still believed whole-heartedly up until the age of about 16 when I started questioning but still went along with all the beliefs. Creation, no Christmas, no celebrating birthdays, no blood transfusions etc. It was only when I started university that I let that lot go. I went from JW to agnostic to wiccan to atheism. I'm much happier with regards to the whole belief front now.

Coming in a bit late on this one. After reading the prior comments, I probably fit best with the agnostic theists. I've had some personal experiences that seem to me as fitting with the idea that there is some sort of Supreme Being. But I am extremely uncomfortable with the idea of enforcing my ideas of said Being on anyone else. Plus, there's the whole thing of my ideas of said Being seem to change on a semi-regular basis.

I was raised very much US Southern Baptist, and my mother's family is primarily Pentecostal (yes, with the whole speaking in tongues & women not being allowed to wear makeup, cut their hair (unless it's severely damaged), wear pants or short sleeves, etc.). But my parents weren't really church-goers. My paternal g-mother was the one dragging me off to every church event she could find, and my parents would go for weddings, funerals, etc. Although my mother is Definitely a Christian, she doesn't seem to subscribe to any particular denomination or to care much about others' faith as long as they behave in a manner that seems moral & ethical to her.

Somewhere around the age of... 14? 15? ish? I really started thinking about where I fell on the whole religion question. At the time, I was just coming out of the above strong indoctrination (although it never truly bothered me if I found that someone I liked believed differently), & so couldn't quite classify myself as non-Christian. At the time, I settled on "non-denominational Christian." In college, it became "agnostic, but more-or-less Christian" & eventually "err, Wiccan? Sort of? But Definitely Pagan." And now, it's come around to Agnostic Theism. *shrug* It's all good, I guess? AKA, whatever works? Heh.

Have tried to fill this in as best I can but for several of them I found it difficult to pick an option. I have arguably always had a broadly Christian outlook. But having said that, my beliefs incorporate a whole lot of other supernatural aspects that aren't necessarily Christian, or viewpoints that don't maybe fit into the stereotypical Christian worldview. Also while I am usually (if not always confident of basics (eg existence of God), I am a lot less certain on details. And this is partly self-encouraged havering (though certainly not entirely so) as I think 100% certainty can be dangerous in any believer. See the old Quaker proverb: "Always consider that you may be wrong..."

Belief - repost

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