DarkMarxSoul t1_iw9sngu wrote on November 14, 2022 at 1:01 AM

Reply to comment by logicalmaniak in A cross between an Existentialist and an Old Testament prophet, Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard urged his "single individual" reader to follow the "highest passion" of faith rather than becoming one of the stereotyped pseudo-individuals of "The Crowd" by thelivingphilosophy

> Again, not believing it's real doesn't have to be so destructive! It's a simple belief. So what if it's not real. Why does that change anything at all?

You act according to belief. It is a necessary component of logical chains of action. You have to have certain facts you're committed to that explain why you do what you do. Again: you eat a banana believing that it will satiate your hunger. You don't eat drywall, in part, because you don't believe it's going to satiate your hunger (at least as much drywall as you can stomach eating). That is what beliefs are for.

> Lots of people believe in simulation theory, or that it's just a dream, or a samsaran illusion without starving to death!

No, they really don't. They talk as if they believe in simulation theory, or that it's a dream, but they don't truly and authentically commit to it. They can't. To truly and authentically commit to the idea that the world is not real would require you, for consistency, to remove any meaning from the idea that things need to be real to motivate action. You would need to treat the delusions of all hallucinatory schizophrenics as equally real as anything else you see, not just for them but for you. You would have to believe in all gods, fairytales, and supernatural entities, and live as though they exist.

True belief is not a mere fancy that you entertain mentally without integrating it into your chain of action. Belief is BELIEF, an earnest commitment to the reality of something such that you factor it into the decisions you make. If you make any decisions that are contrary to your supposed "belief", that's an indicator that you are not truly and authentically committed to it and therefore it doesn't comprise an actual belief.

> I suffered huge anxiety, PTSD, depression, etc from a childhood of sustained abuse. I met God. Now it's all gone.

It's very nice that you were able to delude your brain into thinking it healed by slapping a cure-everything placebo over it, but that has no place in philosophical discussions of what exists, or whether or not faith is a valid path to truth.

> God is with me, and it's as real as anything else in reality.

It's not, you're twisting and warping the definition of "real" because you aren't committed to coherency. You're arguing the topic in bad faith.