How does one hold two contradictory beliefs despite the blatant incoherence between the two?

split personality disorder?

because humans are hypocrites by nature….people like things that make them feel better at the time..for most people things are resolutely true until they suddenly arnt and until something happens to point it out they don’t ever think about it…its not just the case with religion, science has its fair share of this as well….for instance the theory that the big bang was the start of everything…i mean on the one hand its as possible as anything else on the other it would be suggesting that before it there was nothing which then suddenly exploded, to the casual observer that may seem somewhat ridiculous almost as ridiculous as say the Noah ark story…..slightly lost track of my point here…oh yeh basically i’d say because “believing something” isnt the same as knowing, understand or often even having thought about something…..its easier to accept a daft contradiction than accept not knowing and the unpleasant after-taste of universal doubt

Let me put in a word in defense of these people, which is not something I commonly do. They believe that the general rules of the will of God are laid down in the Bible, Koran or whatever holy book they use. These books are of course ambivalent on many points and additionally there is the question of why choose one book over the others, but that is a separate matter. Once one makes the leap of faith in settling on one book and one interpretation of it, then one is in a position of knowing God’s will, at least on specific matters of morality. Saying that it is not possible to know completely the will of God arises because the Universe is in large measure indifferent to the rules in holy books. Good people can suffer misfortunes and evil people can prosper.

Caveat: I’m not a believer.

But it’s something like @LostInParadise said – they believe that God (which one?) revealed his will to some person or persons in the distant past, who wrote it down and passed it down like a (presumably infallible) game of Telephone right down to the present day. God, again, doesn’t have to reveal every little thing about his nature in order to say “Be Excellent to each other!” (which seems to be what most of the rules are about).

People who choose a more down-to-earth explanation for Holy Writ (like me) suggest that it was written by human hand after all, and ones with different agendas at that, but that is a different matter.

It’s sort of like how I’m telling you what I think right now. You can totally tell the facts that I’ve revealed to you about my faith (or lack thereof), but the rest of me is completely unknowable to you. You don’t know what I look like beyond this little picture, you don’t know where I live or much of my history, etc., but you have one little parcel of Laureth’s Revealed Truths. And it’s entirely possible that I’ll agree with someone else sometime, making me somewhat contradictory. ;) Maybe everyone has a little piece of God (which one?).

Or maybe everyone just has an agenda. Which I think is more likely.

You have created God in your own image if he hates all the same people you do.

God is said to be mysterious, and it is all about trusting that he has revealed appropriate information so the theist may quote it with complete confidence. I find it interesting that in Homer’s Iliad, Zeus gives Agamemnon a misleading dream to provoke particular actions rather than telling the truth. Homer realised that divine signs may not be read in the way the receiver wants to read them, but often mean something entirely different. The Christian God however seems to be ‘mysterious’ when the Christian is unable to account for his genocide, arrogance or unforgiving nature, but then he is infallible (and by assumption the interpretation of the theist too) when he performs acts of kindness and love.

Hopefully the theist will realise that these contradictions evaporate if you accept the simple fact that religion and the supernatural are inventions of humans for the sole purpose of understanding a world that is greater than ourselves.

@laureth Kudos for that Bill & Ted reference, as for which part of god: i hope i get the penis… ;-)

@LostInParadise: yes but then again, it’s bad enough religions contradict eachother, most even contradict themselves! i seriously have problems believing even the most basic of the religious beliefs, or that anybody actually believes them…

The average person, religious or not, relies a great deal on what they’re told by people of authority. Even secularists, unless they are scientists themselves, will tend to assume that what they read in textbooks or in Discover magazine is “the way things are”, i.e. true, by virtue of the authority of the source.

Religious people invest the same kind of authority in their trusted role models. Even evangelicals, who would deny that they have a clergy, still often look to others as exemplars and “elders” and will take ideological cues from them, particularly in the many matters where the Bible leaves room for interpretation.

The Bible, for instance, is basically mute on the subject of politics. If one were to objectively try to infer Jesus’ social philosophy from his recorded sayings, I think it’s unlikely that one would see him even as advocating democracy, much less as a proponent of consumerist capitalism, capital punishment, gun ownership, self-reliance and the projection of military power. But because high-profile religious personalities say that these philosophies mesh just fine with Christ’s message, and because that’s how many Americans are naturally inclined to think anyway, then this ideology gets accepted as fundamentally Christian.

And that’s the key, really. People are just waiting for someone who speaks with authority to give a stamp of approval to what they want to believe in the first place. If some authority tells people that their own personal inclinations are right, then they’re not going to seriously question that claim. It’s when an authority makes claims that go against our personal inclinations that we balk and question the authority.

So, yes, when push comes to shove, believers are forced to admit that “God’s ways are not your ways, nor are His thoughts your thoughts”. But if someone who they see as having a strong link to God tells them that God thinks like they do, that’s all the green light they need.

I’m not sure why your question is so filled with rage, confusion and horrid generalization; but as one of the… hmm… 2.. maybe 3 Christians in all the land of Fluther I will attempt to answer anyway.

Put simply, I believe the will of God is for me to be more like His son (among other things). If I were to use the phrase “it’s God’s will” (something I don’t think I’ve ever done), it would refer to an action or an idea that coincides with that belief.. nothing more.

As far as this bit: “And not only that but apparently god has great fun in giving mixed messages around, since apparently he always agrees with people with different opinions”. I’m not sure how you would deduce this without knowing God’s will yourself. However, I don’t believe it is God giving mixed messages. I believe it is the very diverse and unique filter through which each individual hears the same message which leads to the confusion.

Not completely up on religion, but I am pretty sure they believe God (at least in the Christian sense) revealed his rules and thoughts through human messengers like Moses, those who wrote the bible and especially through his son Jesus.

As @laureth said, you can know what someone, even another person, thinks based on what they say or do while the essence of them remains unknown to you.

Christians may not be able to fully understand God’s plan for them, but generally speaking most of them believe that God gave them the Bible as a guideline or a game plan. So even though they do not know the final “will” of God they can claim to understand at least partially what it is to live a life as God intended.

God is angry…
because he doesn’t exist.

Read the book Atheism: The Case Against God for the answer to your question.

George Orwell coined the term for believing two contradictory thoughts at the same time: doublethink.

Am I guilty of this? Yes. We probably all are on some subject or other. I happen to believe in God (though not so much in religious rituals) and I also believe in evolution. I think creationists are idiots, and creationism should not be taught in schools. I can’t possibly explain how God and Evolution can both be true in my mind, but they are.

I find myself leaning more and more toward a Deistic interpretation of the universe, where God is like a computer programmer and the universe is simply the currently running software.

@NaturalMineralWater Confusion? maybe. Generalization? check. Rage? not so much. I really couldn’t care less, it’s just really mind boggling.

As for the bit you pointed out: how am i supposed to say which one actually is right? nobody can prove they actually are talking with god so why should i treat them any different? As far as i can tell they’re all right in the same degree. I have no base upon which basing any kind of distinction.

@drdoombot Back when I was a believer, I had no trouble reconciling a belief in God with a belief in evolution. All that was necessary was to conclude that the bible is not literal. God created the universe in 7 days? Ok, but who’s to say how long a ‘day’ is to God? God created Adam and Eve in His image? Ok, but maybe God looks like a monkey. I just kind of figured that God set the whole thing in motion, and the rest is history, as they say. I am not mocking this, BTW, I am sincerely trying to be helpful.

These days I am an agnostic with atheistic leanings. I’m sure I am still capable of deluding myself into accepting two contradictory beliefs, but I am not aware of what they may be.

@augustlan, you believe in Evelyn, don’t you? There’s proof of it right there. =)

People have great difficulty holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. One way they do it is through a general strategy of information avoidance. They don’t go in much for education. Or if they feel the need to get any information, they go to places like Fox News. Another is through selective blindness. They literally block out, can’t see or dismiss contrary information, or they develop “analysis paralysis” and are unable to process the implications of information that threaten their core beliefs.

In another forum I asked Why do Born Again Christians seem to have so much trouble reasoning logically? in an attempt to see how and when these blocking techniques came into play. The results were remarkable, insofar as the respondents who chose to argue with me demonstrated, without realizing they were doing so, all the analytical deficits I described.

Its tragic, really, how many people literally cannot think straight.