I took notes on a short video snippet of Dennis Prager characterizing what people deliberately, often irrationally, believe. I took notes on this snippet, posted on 1/23/2024 on Facebook. It clip is likely from one of Prager’s Fireside Chats. I will respond to what I quoted.
Prager (P after this): “People believe what they want to believe.”
My response: That people want to believe and continue to believe what is false, though it is made clear to them that it goes against what is Biblical, or it is a lie, a self-delusion, or a communal delusion, self-contradictory, irrational, illogical, counter-intuitive and not backed by current evidence provided by scrupulous scientific research.
It is sobering to think that we cling to the false and erroneous with such firmness, conviction, stubbornness, and consistency. It indicates to me that we all have a story that we originated or inherited from our family, our peers, or our culture. Since the human will is self-controlled more by our passions and sentiments than by our cool judgment and powers of reason (it should be the other way around if we would be impartial, judicious and lovers of truth, no matter how uncomfortable and disturbing what is revealed threatens our core beliefs.
We feel strongly about what we believe in. We are convinced too enthusiastically that we are correct, and we too enthusiastically reject any competing belief, not objectively studying rival points of view based on their merits and flaws, instead of our pro or con feelings about their content as if matches or varies from our own views.
P: “People believe what they want to believe: that God is unnecessary for a moral universe. They want to believe it so they believe it. This is a universal issue among human beings. A minority of human beings believe a thing because it makes sense.”
My response: If God exists, and the Mother and Father, Jesus and other good deities (some major and some minor) exist (they all do), then it seems likely that these deities with such powerful intellects and loving affinity to truth, if they offer us ethical advice, moral codes or the Ten Commandments, these divine moral messages to us are objectively true and binding upon us, or close to such status as our ethical standards, so it makes sense to acknowledge and live within the bounds set for our behavior by good deities. The good deities are necessary for a moral universe.
Prager is a rational theologian and ethicist. He wants us to believe in God and follow wholesome moral code, divinely inspired, because it is reasonable and makes sense to so believe and so act. We should be able to provide defensible reasons for so believing and so acting, and we should be able to justify so believing and so acting with clear, plainly present language.
P: “People who want to believe that men give birth believe that men give birth. Men do not give birth. It is an absurdity. Yet, there are millions of people that say that men give birth with great conviction because they want to believe.”
My response: Prager is perhaps the world’s leading expert on Leftism, which he describes as the most powerful secular religion and ideology of the 20th and 21st centuries. The absurd believing that men give birth, believed by millions of Westerns, requires further causal explanation, to supplement what I wrote above.
If what Prager refers to as the absurd, mendacious, outrageously absurd and irrationally accepted beliefs of Leftists and from Leftism is understood as a presently marching mass movement (cultural Marxism), then those with these absurd beliefs are true believers, and such wild, untrue beliefs stem from their doctrinal story, and must cohere with the narrative of that holy cause. Such fanatical loyalty and unswerving, illogical but powerful belief allegiance to such lies illustrates how ideological fervency steels unshakable ideological belief. These zealots have drunk the cool aid: they believe what they want to believe because the intellectuals, gurus or demagogues running the movement have told them what to believe, what to support, and they do as told to believe and act.
P: “The idea that God is completely unnecessary for moral behavior for a moral society is a belief that people hold because they want to believe it. They don’t want to think God is necessary. It is not a matter that they think God exists. They don’t want to think God is necessary.”
My response: He hits upon something deep here. People are okay with believing God exists as long as they do not believe that God is any longer necessary for modern, secularly humanistic people to listen to and obey to lead moral lives as individuals and as a people.
If people can deny that God is necessary, then they don’t have to obey the good deities, and their denying God is necessary is a convenient belief and gateway for them to act however they are inclined to act, without divine sanction (The sanction is there whether we believe in it and God or not.).
In fact, we either serve the Good Spirits or the Evil Spirits. If we deny that serving the Good Spirits is necessary, then we behave in ways that lead us to being ensnared and enslaved by the Evil Spirits. Human will not tolerate for long a loss of values and a story to live by. If God does not provide them with sensible, moral beliefs to adhere to, the young and foolish will turn unwittingly to Satan to receive beliefs and answers that are disadvantageous for human well-being.
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