Million dollars

If you believe in Smurfs I'll give you a million dollars. Can you do it? Can you force yourself to believe in Smurfs? I'm sure you could lie to me, try to convince me that you believe. But what if I told you that to prove to me that you believe in my tiny blue Sunday morning childhood distraction, you could no longer eat donuts,
and every Wednesday you had to hop in a circle on one leg? Still, you might be able to fake it. I'd owe you a million dollars. But, what if I could read your mind? What would I find there? A continuous repetition of 'I believe, I believe, I believe', like some self delusional broken record? (a record is like a big CD. A CD is that thing you don't buy when you illegally download music straight off bit torrent). I bet I'd find that you did not, in fact, believe in Smurfs.

What would it take to convince you that Smurfs were real? Think about that. What would your criteria for evidence be? More than some short, balding, high-school drop out saying so, I'll can tell you that.

I think it is not only important for everyone to contemplate what their own benchmark for evidence is, it is imperative. Ethical even. I'll touch more on the ethics of belief more in a later post. It would make this one far to long and I know you have to get back to Facebook, Youtube, and porn before your over sensitized brain melts from too much critical thinking. I know mine will. I have to look at pics of cats with poor grammar doing silly things after every paragraph.

So, I can't convince you that Smurfs exist. Belief isn't a choice is the point I'm trying to make. It is a state of mind, much like love. You don't get to pick. You don't believe it until some magic moment when you do. Or sometimes the other way around.

Which means there is a flip side to belief that is important to remember as an atheist. While a person can't be made, by my word alone, to believe in Smurfs, neither could I get a person to disavow their loving pet. Try it, I dare you. Go to your friends house and tell them that the dog that they play with every day isn't real. It is merely a delusion. That pile of shit in the hallway is in their imagination. That smell? A misfiring of the olfactory. That warm embrace at the end of the day? Wishful thinking.

Hence the importance of finding out what you need, what magic does it take, for you to believe, or not. Do you listen to someone that says they see tiny blue people living in mushrooms in your back yard, or do you listen to your own nose and clean up the very real dog shit in the hallway.

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