beliefs on Self-Deception

The most insidious deception in human history is the lie that says, “God is against you.”

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

One needs to be right before getting righteous.

Core beliefs can be hard to change because they’ve generally been with us for a long time, and we assume that they’re true. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to changing our core beliefs is that they are s...

He who believes his doctrine to be perfectly right and true has only to lift his hands and touch his ears and discover they are the long furry ears of a donkey.

Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.

In an attempt to engage in critical thinking, scholars suggest asking whether our opinions are true by simply asking if the opposite could be true. This practice (I’m not joking) is named after on an ...

We are what we believe we are.

’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

Doubt is really the felt tension that exists between a belief you have and a contrary claim you do not yet believe…Simply put, doubt is that experience of one of our beliefs seeming like it might be f...

Compared to our personality traits, character traits are more malleable. Our personalities can only be managed (or tamed, some might say). Our characters can be shaped, although this isn’t easy and ha...

Medical literature is replete with case reports of patients dying, not from actual illness, but from believing they were sick, from the fear they were going to die.

To hold to a doctrine or an opinion with the intellect alone is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by.

There may have been a time when people found it easy to believe anything. But we are finding it vastly easier to disbelieve anything. Both processes save the human mind from the disgusting duty of dis...

“I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.”

Let’s talk about how our beliefs shape our actions, especially when fear is involved. You've probably heard the phrase, "ideas have consequences," right? It's easy to see this in act...

“I know” seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, “I thought I knew.”

If I am to give you credit, I need to find you credible, while avoiding the risk of seeming credulous in giving credence to your discreditable account. From religious credos to street cred, from profe...

The root of our English term doubt has to do with duplicity. It is being divided or doubled up in our thinking. But this isn’t a matter of simply being confused or unable to make up our mind or ...

A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.

One day when George MacDonald, the great Scottish preacher and writer, was talking with his son, the conversation turned to heaven and the prophets’ version of the end of all things. “It seems too goo...

Psychoanalysis . . . daily demonstrates to us how youthful persons lose their religious belief as soon as the authority of the father breaks down.

Belief doesn’t create truth. Unbelief doesn’t destroy truth. Christian faith goes beyond reason but not against reason.

I do not put much stock in "believing in God." The grammar of "belief" invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. "Belief" implies propos...

You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into.

When we aim at certainty when it comes to our Christian beliefs, it sets us up for failure. …Imagine someone with a lot of time on their hands who painstakingly constructs a five-foot-high house of...

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...

It is always crucial to remember that our beliefs are formed not only through reason and argument but also through social conditioning.