Rationality is about winning. Sometimes it’s a great psychological relief to be able to use belief as a shield or help. I have never had any qualms about using it to counter other irrational beliefs, fears, anguishes. Like for instance, when I was a child, the fear of darkness or monsters below my bed or whatnot.
Telling myself “ok, this isn’t real and you know it, so no fear should be necessary” doesn’t have quite the same effect as “God will help me chase them away / protect me”.
Those are two different ideas, even though we use “belief” for both. I believe in God, gods, fairies, anything and whatever, whenever I find it convenient, just the same way I’ll use nootropics when I’ll find those convenient, both to the purpose of enhancing my mood or cognition. That is believing, as in, making up a comfortable, warm, fuzzy story, that recovers myself my serenity. Not believe as in “what can help me understand or manipulate the real, physical world, what is real and what will have a causal effect on that external world”.
The only wrong consequence I can foresee for such a behavior is to go too far, to really start believing in such things, and hence loose some of your potential for rational reasoning as you’ll then have to defend a lie and forgo truth sometimes, or also, feeling the need to elaborate further and further upon the stories, whether you believe them or not, wasting your time upon fantasizing.
Please note here how such stories which were at first understood to be fiction became serious stuff. Science fiction that becomes religion, as in scientism (to end up believing in your own story), or how some people will go to ludicrous lengths to demonstrate how star wars is still physically “not impossible” (to waste your time embellishing your fantasy and rationalizing it).
Rationality is about winning. Sometimes it’s a great psychological relief to be able to use belief as a shield or help. I have never had any qualms about using it to counter other irrational beliefs, fears, anguishes. Like for instance, when I was a child, the fear of darkness or monsters below my bed or whatnot.
Telling myself “ok, this isn’t real and you know it, so no fear should be necessary” doesn’t have quite the same effect as “God will help me chase them away / protect me”.
Those are two different ideas, even though we use “belief” for both. I believe in God, gods, fairies, anything and whatever, whenever I find it convenient, just the same way I’ll use nootropics when I’ll find those convenient, both to the purpose of enhancing my mood or cognition. That is believing, as in, making up a comfortable, warm, fuzzy story, that recovers myself my serenity. Not believe as in “what can help me understand or manipulate the real, physical world, what is real and what will have a causal effect on that external world”.
The only wrong consequence I can foresee for such a behavior is to go too far, to really start believing in such things, and hence loose some of your potential for rational reasoning as you’ll then have to defend a lie and forgo truth sometimes, or also, feeling the need to elaborate further and further upon the stories, whether you believe them or not, wasting your time upon fantasizing.
Please note here how such stories which were at first understood to be fiction became serious stuff. Science fiction that becomes religion, as in scientism (to end up believing in your own story), or how some people will go to ludicrous lengths to demonstrate how star wars is still physically “not impossible” (to waste your time embellishing your fantasy and rationalizing it).