this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Why not? Because truth matters. Look at the current united states to see what lies cause.
From my perspective they are not lies.
In the hope of civil discussion, it is not helpful for you to frame it that way IMO.
my choosing to engage with something that might not be true isn’t hurting anyone. i’m a solo practitioner of a non christian faith. :p of course the truth matters, but when staring at it makes you actively suicidal and feel like everything lacks meaning, why not make use of the circuitry our brains evolved with, and let a little bit of What If light the path forward?
What is truth and how do you know that?
There's no way to know the truth on something like this, but you should always seek it. There are ways to know certain things aren't true though. For example, the Judeo-Christian faith must be wrong, at least to an extent, because it's self-contradictory. Also, most religions are mutually exclusive, so how do you go about seeking the correct one if striving for truth is valuable?
Is this true? Because if so it is a contradiction.
This is just another way of making a truth claim even though you can't know the truth.
Who says seeking truth is something we ought to do? Particularly if knowing the truth is an impossibility. These are all assertions as to what we should do without any justification as to why we should do them.
I'm being slightly annoying to shine your own standards on yourself. Not meant to be combative.
Knowledge and truth are two different things, although I should have written it better. There's no way to know the truth on this particular subject. (Well, there is a way to know theoretically, if a god exists. There isn't a way to know if one doesn't exist though. You can't prove that something that doesn't exist doesn't exist. You can only prove that something exists.)
No, you can use logic to prove certain things can't exist. If there's a contradiction, it can't be correct, for example.
I'm not making a universal statement. I'm making the statement that someone who values truth should seek truth. That seems self-evident.
Assuming you're a skeptic...
Arguments for God's existence (such as classical theistic arguments) are not merely isolated truth claims—they function at the paradigmatic level, offering a foundation for knowledge itself.
If you deny God's existence, you must account for the reliability of reason, logic, and abstract universals like mathematics. If these are simply “self-evident,” then you're assuming the very thing your worldview has no means to justify.
Only if you can justify the validity of logic in your worldview. But without a transcendent source of rationality, why assume logic is binding or that it applies universally? You're using a tool (logic) without explaining why it ought to work or why it's trustworthy in a purely materialistic or skeptical framework.
Okay well this is just an opinion then. My main point here is that you can't propose any "oughts" without a justification.
Again. I'm being nit-picky but I feel like this thread is meant to invite some apologetic banter.
All of those are based on axioms. They're true if the axioms are true, but not otherwise. They are useful, but not self-evident. The axioms seem to hold though.
Why do we need a transcendent source of rationality? We only need to build upon foundations of solid axioms.
Do I need to spell out why someone who values truth should seek it? It's not really an opinion, but a statement. I guess it isn't a complete statement. I guess a more complete statement would be "someone who values truth, and wants to find what they value, should seek truth." Is that better? I don't think that middle portion is required to spell out, but whatever.
It's impossible for you to know that.
Says who? How do they justify that claim?
Axioms are pragmatic and therefore used a lot in math and science but when you enter the realm of metaphysics (e.g. Philosophy) you have to ground your worldview in a justified true belief.
Why do you think truth matters so much? Don't disagree, but why is it humans will forego a more beneficial situation if it's proven to be "untrue" or "not real" etc?
More beneficial for whom? The truth is that pollution is bad. I can make myself feel better about how much energy I use by assuring myself that I'm chosen by God and deserve to consume resources and pollute. This harms other people though. The truth is non-opinionated, so actually useful. Believing something to make yourself feel better, and ignoring problems, is biased favoring yourself and against others.
The truth has value in decision making, while comforting lies have value in stress reduction. Choosing 'truth' over 'comfort' is a long-termist strategy. Being satisfied by a simple answer will make you feel better now, increasing survivability in the short term, but finding a better model of the world to operate by, a.k.a. learning, lets you make better decisions for the rest of your life.
Well I'm not that guy but I can speak from myself that every time I have been true to myself and others, I have felt more and more real and tangible myself. And it is a much better feeling than "fooling yourself" with the why not, using rational logic to just make a decision like that. I always say to my kids, nobody can know what happens when we die and if they say they do, they are making it up. But we can talk about some truths still, that are felt, and then communicated to you as just something that is comfirmed by experience, that is, you experienced something nobody else should know and then they did too, with synchronicity and other phenomenon which just makes us assume it's true. But in the sense of scientific fact it can not be described because words and language kind of is not enough or it doesn't kind of translate at all.
I think that's a really healthy conversation to have with your kids, man! I totally agree with your sentiment, and being "authentic" feels right, but it's odd when you think about it. Where does it come from? Humans self-deceive all the time, right? It's almost a useful skill in certain situations (e.g. optimism bias), but there's an overriding feeling that "real" is "better". It just boggles my mind a bit tbh.
It was unlocked hugely by an insight I got long ago that is a deep truth that I always keep an eye on, which is that;
The more honest you are with others, the more honest you are with yourself.
It is one of the effects of "mirror neurons" phenomenon and the realisation that our subconscious, our "self" does not explicitly distinguish between you and other people the way your prefrontal cortex and conscious mind does. This is old research by now but to me it makes so much sense and I see the effects in people around me all the time.
In dream or deep meditation, "god experiences" (I forget the English name for it) or with psychedelics, this comes to the surface and provokes many "we are one" messages and compassionate teachings such as the golden rule and karma etc. But bottom line, most of our brain just doesn't give exactly a fuck about who is who at any given time. Just the relationship between them.
Similarly, if you talk down on yourself, you are also more likely to feel like other people are not enough. We all mirror each other and react to subconscious signals every day. This is an cascading effect, that will become exponentially useful if you consciously choose and gradually adjust how to be towards others.
(I kind of go off on this tangent now, because I apparently like talking about it but feel free to ignore the rest if you aren't into the specifics of my understanding of why it is like this)
Our bodies are talking to each other (subconscious to subconscious) with immense bandwidth, from smells and hormones, microexpressions, physical notes (leaving objects or others in some specific state). But most of it is discarded and not raised to system 1 (frontal lobe)
By learning other people's predictions, our body can predict events and sometimes chains of several events between several people, and intuit how they came to be at a certain place at a certain time or why the car keys are in a new place, inferring other events, and all these predictions occurs in system 2, subconsciously and continually so that our focus can be on what's at hand.
By being predictable we incur safety and signal affinity. Any deviation from normal will be evaluated by system 2 if it should warrant a notice to system 1 to investigate, and that will most often be a signal of discomfort, as unpredictability of any kind is an "expensive" metabolic operation.
A very dry explanation that perhaps gives a little insight into the crisscrossing neurological mechanics. It's good to first understand that the body is continuously budgeting for any prediction error, and for instance meeting new people or interacting with someone that speaks differently than we expect, is draining from a pure metabolic standpoint. The body needs to have prepared glucose and other material and if it happens many times in a row with no rest period for the thoughts to settle, the stress can make you straight up ignore what others say and just answer your prediction to what they just said. It's the cheapest mode of operation and most common during a day.
I digress a lot but it's fun because I just pieced together a pretty solid understanding of the whole and previously I had just so many sporadic and isolated insights that lately has found each other into a cohesive model and it's kind of cathartic to just share it blatantly. It's a tiny bit probable that my ADHD medication makes me ramble a bit and I hope I didn't overwhelm ya. Cheers!