Rational Beliefs

[JKYRYW]

Hi,

I am currently in the processing of trying to write a college essay with the prompt:

Explain a belief you accepted at some time in your life but recently rejected on the basis of a rational process. You might
choose your former belief in the existence of Santa Claus, for example, but you should remember that the rejection you
discuss must have been made on a rational basis. Perhaps you changed your mind because of something you have heard,
or because of some experience you have had; but for this essay you must go beyond reporting what you heard or
describing what happened to you; you must display the process of reasoning that carried you to your new belief. In your
essay, explain the belief itself, your former reasons for holding it, and, most important, the rational process that led you
to reject it.
You may interpret “rejection” in a weak sense, such that you do not need to show that your former belief was false. For
example, if you rejected “eating spinach makes me strong,” you need not have come to the conclusion “eating spinach
does not make me strong.” All you need for this example is good reason for thinking that your information is not
sufficient to support any conclusion as to whether or not spinach makes you strong. Please consider your topic carefully.
We mentioned “Santa Claus” by way of illustration only. A good essay will use a serious belief that you have rejected
recently.

I'm having a lot of trouble brainstorming beliefs that I've rejected on a rational basis. I've looked at doing changed political/economic beliefs... But my reasoning for rejecting those beliefs doesn't seem to be rational. I'm also fairly surely that discussing my becoming atheism would be a fairly overused topic.

Does anyone have an examples of types of beliefs that get rejected in everyday life for rational reasons? I'm not looking for someone to do the essay for me, just get me going down the right path in terms of brainstorming.

[DEATHETERNAL]

The belief that colleges have a hardworking atmosphere that promotes productivity, competence, and a good work ethic in students. Now that you are going to college you can see that belief is a joke .

[Deleted]

Im a little sceptical on the reasons of why you were assigned this paper.

Im willing to bet that if the professor sees something that he truly disagress with on a fundamental level, you will be branded for the rest of the course in his eyes.
Subjects like theese are prone to personal bias, so be careful.

[Julian Rayne]

Is there nothing you used to believe in that you eventually realized was nonsense? Homeopathy, astrology, dowsing, hypnosis, organic food, kirlian photography, tai-chi, UFO-aliens, reflexolgy, yeti, bigfoot, the Loch-Ness monster, palm-reading, psychics, tarrot, ouija-boards, feng-shui, faith-healing, ear-candling, mayan apocalypse, bottled water. Didn't you ever believe in any of those things?

[Deleted]

You could go for things that are unintuitive for humans, nature has a lot of stuff liek that. Look for things science has showed us recently and which don't make much sense to you.

[JKYRYW]

Is there nothing you used to believe in that you eventually realized was nonsense? Homeopathy, astrology, dowsing, hypnosis, organic food, kirlian photography, tai-chi, UFO-aliens, reflexolgy, yeti, bigfoot, the Loch-Ness monster, palm-reading, psychics, tarrot, ouija-boards, feng-shui, faith-healing, ear-candling, mayan apocalypse, bottled water. Didn't you ever believe in any of those things?

I think going with something along those lines may be my best bet. I was hoping to find something more sophisticated/deep, but given the word limit I think that would be a problem anyway.

Egzis, I feel the same way. Writing about how I became an atheist would be easy, but the risk of someone taking offense is too great.

[Simulacrum]

I think going with something along those lines may be my best bet. I was hoping to find something more sophisticated/deep, but given the word limit I think that would be a problem anyway.

Egzis, I feel the same way. Writing about how I became an atheist would be easy, but the risk of someone taking offense is too great.

The problem with defying irrational beliefs that aren't popularily recognized as irrational (such as those listed by JonTargaryen) is that you might end up offending your teacher and get yourself flunked.

The more intelligent someone is, the better they are at rationalizing their own beliefs. An intelligent, well-educated person who has held an irrational belief for decades will likely have an amazing list of ligical fallacies and rhetorical tricks up his sleeve to defend it, to the point where it's practically impossible to break through. At the end of the day, the ultimate judge of if a belief is irrational or not is reality; put it to through testing and see if it holds up or not, but a lot of irrational beliefs can't be confronted that easily, and even the ones that can can be dismissed by a believer as the source just being biased.

It's really not a good idea to confront those. Stick to something more popular.

[Catta]

Many beliefs like homeopathy and other new age nonsense use the words energy quite liberally. If you believed any of those at any one point you could write about how you actually came to understand the word energy and how is it not applicable to those instances that said belief claim it to be

---------- Post added 2012-08-19 at 01:21 AM ----------

Is there nothing you used to believe in that you eventually realized was nonsense? Homeopathy, astrology, dowsing, hypnosis, organic food, kirlian photography, tai-chi, UFO-aliens, reflexolgy, yeti, bigfoot, the Loch-Ness monster, palm-reading, psychics, tarrot, ouija-boards, feng-shui, faith-healing, ear-candling, mayan apocalypse, bottled water. Didn't you ever believe in any of those things?

Bottled water is a lie!?
*jumps out the window*

[Feranor]

Bottled water is a lie!?
*jumps out the window*

Speaking of which, just go through a list of Penn & Teller's Bullshit episodes. There you have plenty of possible options.

[Deleted]

Also, do not write about atheism being a rational belief, that argument is way above a College paper. http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/v...?f=23&t=112952

[Catta]

[video=youtube;JCPOHNNom5M]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCPOHNNom5M[video]



Speaking of which, just go through a list of Penn & Teller's Bullshit episodes. There you have plenty of possible options.

Well its not a lie - what they try to tell you about bottled water is a lie but not the bottled water itself

[Lilfrier]

I've pretty legitimately checked out on brand loyalt fanboyism at every level. Rather than holding that what I have/like is obviously superoir, I learned through experience and investigation that people have preferences that override a narrow win in performance, and that personal needs can eliminate things like aesthetic preferences. For example, I decided at first that Windows Phone was what I wanted, and that I found its ability to run more smoothly than Android to be an obvious win for it. That comes after using Android for more than a year at the time. I'm still going to switch to Windows Phone, but I've realized that it's not the best thing for people already in the Apple ecosystem or older folks used to something else, as transition for those people can be a tough go with technology.

[Deleted]

Nice topic for a report.

Short digression: I am not 100% enthusiastic over it because it does assume you had changed your mind on some (significant) belief during your life, which could not be the case. I hated when I was given that during my school days.

More on topic, I see the following as some starting points.

- Atheism
Probably the most obvious choice, hence overdone as the OP says.
- Child Beliefs
Santa, Tooth Fairy, etc. are some beliefs tipically held because you use to trust your parents fully at a young age, so you believe whatever they tell you. Becoming an adult, you do not trust them so much, e.g. I would not believe my mother claiming to having met aliens unless she does have a proof.
- Nature seen by a child
Cartoons and fairy tales often depict nature in an idealized way. Animals often have a sense of justice, and help the good guy against the evil one. Hence nature is always good, fair, and just. Hunters are evil, since they fight nature. In reality, nature is much more neutral than that. Hunting may appear not so worse than slaughtering animals after having kept them captive for their whole life.
- Vegetarianism
Child do not link eating meat to slaughtering animals.
- Possibly overrated virtues
Studying/working hard should have produced some kind of reward. Instead, less performing people get rewarded more than you because of some external factor.
- Politics
You studied the political system of your country, and thought it was perfect. Now you realize that, while excellent in theory, it had been deformed into something else. Why there's so much corruption? Why citizens feel themselves very distant from who should be their direct representatives? Why in practice companies/police/bureaucracy/... have so much power, shadowing fundamental rights?

Note that the above list does not actually reflect my real current beliefs. I just listed some possible topics about which you could have changed your mind by applying observation and rational thought.

A final suggestion: avoid to support your new belief too strongly, but focus on describing the rational thoughts which made you change your mind. You might want to also discuss whether you think you might change your mind again in your life on that topic.

[Feranor]

Also, do not write about atheism being a rational belief, that argument is way above a College paper. http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/v...?f=23&t=112952

That's not in any way profound. It's just one of the basic cheap pseudo-arguments (among other things he puts up a straw man of atheism, has an incoherent definition of agnosticism and attempts to shift the burden of proof with that).

His entire argument can be summarized by "Atheists [sic] believe there is no god, and they can't provide evidence for that belief." He just attempts to obfuscate how shitty his argument is by throwing around big words.

[Jayburner]

I believed in leprachauns for the longest time when I was a kid. Then after months of searching for one, it dawned on me. 'i don't think they are real'

[Wayne25uk]

Not sure if it helps but i used to believe in Santa,but upon seeing my parents credit card statements i finally knew the truth.
Also after watching Toy Story as a young boy i believed my toys came alive at night when i was asleep,now i just think its silly.
I used to believe in life after death but upon thinking about it i thought to myself how can i ghost talk with no voice box to make the vibrations? How can it move with no propulsion systems in place,and how can you think as a ghost if there is no brain there to process thoughts,and how come when you see ghosts on tv and movies they have the same clothes on they died in,i mean you die,your clothes dont so how is this possible???
Lastly i used to believe in a reason for living,apart from looking after my kids which is only reason i can see living now i think it is really pointless and we werent actually meant to evolve to this state,i mean you're born,you grow up,you work all your life then you die and all that money you worked for goes to your ungrateful family who only wanted you for your money anyways. Hope some of this helped it probably hasnt but my crazy thought process is at least more spacious now i have gotten some of it out

[semaphore]

Also, do not write about atheism being a rational belief, that argument is way above a College paper. http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/v...?f=23&t=112952

That argument is purely being pedantic. Technically there could be a Santa, but you don't have to have proof that there isn't one to reject a belief in Santa. The instructions given to the OP's actually anticipated such silly, pointless nit-pickings.

[Dendrek]

Im a little sceptical on the reasons of why you were assigned this paper.

Im willing to bet that if the professor sees something that he truly disagress with on a fundamental level, you will be branded for the rest of the course in his eyes.
Subjects like theese are prone to personal bias, so be careful.

I wouldn't be. A teacher that asks you to analyze a belief using rationality is more likely going to be open-minded about the belief you choose than say a history teacher asking you to write about an historical event or an English teacher asking you to write about an author's hidden intentions. The teacher is looking for logical reasons to reject a belief. If you actually have logical reasons to reject that belief (and haven't done it simply based on irrational/emotional bias), the belief in question is irrelevant. It's more likely you'd offend him by using bad reasoning then by picking a bad topic.

Although, a teacher *might* be more or less biased in how they judge your reasoning skills based on the topic for a very select number of topics -- they won't give you an A or and F on the topic alone, but they might be more critical of the merits of your arguments given a topic they disagree with. Personally, if I had a topic I thought might be borderline, I'd write about it. I like a challenge. But I'd also be more critical of my own arguments to be on the safe side.

[Kalis]

Is there nothing you used to believe in that you eventually realized was nonsense? Homeopathy, astrology, dowsing, hypnosis, organic food, kirlian photography, tai-chi, UFO-aliens, reflexolgy, yeti, bigfoot, the Loch-Ness monster, palm-reading, psychics, tarrot, ouija-boards, feng-shui, faith-healing, ear-candling, mayan apocalypse, bottled water. Didn't you ever believe in any of those things?

I Googled 'ear candling' as I'd never heard of it - it's amazing what crap some people will believe!

[Deleted]

Well, before the credit crunch of 2008, I had a blithely naive view that the world would keep improving for all people as ideas travelled across the world. I think I clung onto that in an almost quasi-religious manner so as to have some sort of utopia to look forward to and perhaps a change in politics. I realize that now although we have many technological improvements we can't sit back and hope for human progress to just happen.

The process of learning how wrong I was took a lot of reading around.