A belief in a higher power can easily be a rational decision.

Interesting: how can a belief ever be a rational decision? Isn't it irrational by definition?

If you lived in a society that killed/tortured atheists for not believing, it would be extremely rational to (assuming that you value your life over your advertised beliefs), at the very least, pretend that you believe in whatever bullshit people want you to believe.

Pretending to believe is not believing, though.

True. To the outside world it is equivalent though.

Furthermore - there's a saying that "believe in it long enough - and you'll think it's true". So you have to be careful with that - sometimes appearances become deceiving (what you show becomes what you are).

Look up Pascal's wager. Te postulates are debatable, but it's certainly a rational argument.

He doesn't really show that it is possible to believe something intentionally, though.

I think it's certainly possible to make an intentional decision to train/brainwash yourself into believing in something.

Pascal's wager is interesting but it makes a core assumption that makes it laughable - namely which God/religion/deity do you bet on?

The positive sum that the wager demonstrates in a belief in a God is nullified when you divide by the number of Gods/religions/deities in existence (many thousands/millions). Indeed - if you factor exclusive Gods/religions/deities that condemn separate beliefs - the wager goes negative since holding many beliefs that negate each other, with the addition of trying to believe them all, will cost you much more than just not doing so.

This assumes pure "afterlife" expected probabilistic value - I'm ignoring societal pressures which would eliminate this problem of many Gods/afterlife and replace it with "Believe in what we do - or die!". Then it's not Pascal's wager any more - it's believe or die because others force you to.

If it makes you happy then it's rational.

All things you think you know are ultimately founded on axioms, beliefs.

Why do you trust sense-data to be real? Brains in vats, holosuites, yada-yada ...

Reality is that which is practical for us to concern ourselves with. When there is an indication that such a notion might be practical knowledge, then I'll give it some consideration.

>Reality is that which is practical for us to concern ourselves with. //

By that definition reality is completely subjective which rather plays towards my point.

You find the axiomatic basis of scientific understanding to not belong to "practical knowledge". Or that the axiomatic nature of standard logics is not practical? So basically all of physical science, mathematics, logic, ... understanding the epistemological basis of these things is impractical? Because? On such a position theoretical physics would seem to be 'impractical' and not something to concern ourselves [humankind] with - the advances in theoretical physics in the last century or so have worked themselves in to almost all areas of modern 'Western' life.

Until work in theoretical physics yields practical or verifiable results, I am content to consider it fantasy rather than reality. Not to denigrate those who spend their time on such matters, and the social considerations those people have for their peers might make such pursuits somewhat practical for them, but you cannot expect a randomly selected person to consider such knowledge a part of their reality until it has substantial implications for them.

And we do agree that reality is subjective; it's just that if a facet of reality is only perceived by a small fraction of the population, its value is insignificant to most. The value of reality is in its adoption as a foundation for communication.

Lol.

Simple example that many people use day-to-day is relativity and GPS (eg http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.... <- that's just the first likely looking Google result for GPS+relativity, feel free to look for yourself).

I guess things like transistors, fibre optics, nuclear power, and lasers are so far removed from everyday life that theoretical physics simply has no application to reality. /sarcasm

I meant until a particular theory in theoretical physics is found practical, or at least verifiable, it's more fantasy than reality as far as most people are concerned. I never meant to imply that the entire field of theoretical physics is impractical or irrelevant, or that it hasn't yielded any results. At that point, I might expect the physics to fall less in the domain of the theoretical however, and more in applied.

and here we gooooo