Re: Why do you believe in YOUR religion
How? It is like a gamble, a risk, except that rather than gambling for personal gain at the expense of unseen others, the gamble is that an unseen other is good at the expense of being wrong.
My point is that this gamble is based on something. Even if only to make blanket statements such as "I will trust everyone" means that we've experienced someone, and decided to behave in the same manner with everyone, and take the gamble. That we see it as a gamble to do so is indicative of our experience of people thus far, and our conjectures about it.
My point is we can't do much except in the light of what we have experienced. We begin experiencing from the time we're in the womb, and all our subsequent decisions, thoughts, etc. are tied up in that which has gone before.
Will you be applying this reasoning to your decision to trust the rest of your life with a newborn child who you have yet to know?
Well, yes. Because what we do when we decide to have a child is that we base our expectations, our thoughts, our feelings about it on what we've experienced before. This is why people read books about babies and pregnancy, talk to other pregnant moms, and so forth. No one exists in isolation in their own mind. We are all basing our thoughts and decisions on what we've previously experienced.
In the case of motor vehicles, I base my reactions (to drive defensively, in my case) on the experiences I've had and read about since I was a kid about motor vehicles. Because I know from these experiences that some drivers are unreliable and that the vehicles can fail (blow out a tire, stall, etc.), I am cautious and I drive in a way that is looking for problems.
In the case of the pilot of an airplane, I have the experience of knowing that they have to be trained before they are hired to fly, and they are tested in this ability. So I am trusting the pilot and, more broadly the airline, based on my experience of how airlines and pilots work. I am still basing it on experience- the experience of those that test the pilots and give them a license. If it didn't work this way, and any random person could try to fly a plane, it would be too much of a gamble to fly... since it is also my experience (directly) that there is a lot involved in flying a plane and you need some training to do it safely.
As for the US, I don't see myself as part of any national group. By virtue of how the world works, I am categorized by others as a citizen of a nation. However, I don't see myself as any nationality. I am just a creature on the earth. That said, I give no special trust to US citizens. People are people. Some are trustworthy and some are not.
But you may NOT have the information, and yet there is still trust.
Personally, I don't trust when I have no information whatsoever. That doesn't seem like a good idea for survival. I don't need to have *direct* experience, but I need to have *some* experience. Without any whatsoever, I am neutral. I neither trust nor do I distrust. I am seeking information.
Do you provide your personal information to strangers so that they can know you and hence trust you, or do you wait until you decide to trust them?
This depends on what you mean by personal information, and my sense of the energy of the stranger. Maybe I'm lucky; I get vibes off people. If I get a vibe that it would be a bad idea to hand out my information, I don't. I trust my experience of the energy of a person. That said, there are people who are rather a battlefield in terms of their capacity for goodness and badness toward me. So, there are still times that I've been deeply hurt. This is what forgiveness is for.
So there is no relationship, no exchange of the pertinent information.
If they are relating, there is a relationship. It just isn't a personal one yet. I have relationships with people I never even see, like my mail carrier. I don't know much about him/her; s/he only knows my address and mail, yet we are in relationship.
I think we're in relationship with all beings, but of course the intimacy varies.
Did Adam and Eve trust God while not having that knowledge? No.
I don't think it was an issue of trust, necessarily. Trust does not automatically lead to obedience. Lots of children trust their parents and still sometimes disobey. They do so for all kinds of reasons- greed, curiosity, and so forth. Distrust is not the same as these other things.
To get to know someone, to gain that knowledge, requires trusting the person.
Not really, at least not today. In the most pragmatic sense, if all we have is a name and a city, we can get to know someone by looking their records up online. Even without remote "getting to know" methods, we can ask people for information without trusting them. We can share information we don't care if someone else knows, which doesn't show trust, it just shows we have some information about ourselves that isn't considered by us to be dangerously intimate.
Heck, we fill out forms all the time for credit cards, stores, pet adoption, doctors, taxes, government agencies... with all kinds of "personal" information and yet we still worry about identity theft and fraud. We don't necessarily trust. We just share what we feel we need or want to and hope the risk is worth the pay-off. We trust our experience of the statistics enough to hope we're not one of the unfortunate ones.
On a less solid level, I trust my experience of people's energy and the flow of reality. This means I do some things that might be considered odd or illogical, such as avoiding a certain street at a certain time. However, I have learned that by honoring this intuition in myself, I avoid more dangers. When I ignore this, I've gotten myself into trouble.
To gain the knowledge or the skills that a business has, or that a teacher has, requires trust in them. A devotion of time and energy. A devotion of livelihood. A devotion that comes before the knowledge.
Yes, but what we are trusting here is not the business or the teacher. We are trusting the experience that these people had to do certain things, pass certain tests, etc. before they got to where they are now. Students trust me because they trust my PhD certificate, not because they trust
me. They don't trust
me as an individual until they experience me. Until then, they trust the
institution- that I have been tested and found to be worth the degree, that their college has been accredited by an organization that says it lives up to certain standards. You see, they are trusting their experience of social organization- not me. If I show up to somewhere with no resume, no PhD, no publications... very few people will trust me as a teacher except those who are very gullible.
Same for businesses- there is a reason why it's hard to get a business started, people want references, and why ebay has the feedback system, we have the BBB, and so forth. People are trusting their experiences of others to inform their decision to trust.
As another example: Doesn't a relationship between mother and child exist before the child comes to realizing or knowing the nature of that relation?
Yes, but the trust doesn't come until that relationship is experienced. The child doesn't necessarily trust the mother, but out of necessity is dependent on her. If she does not care adequately for the infant, the child will not learn to trust her (and, in that case, it frequently screws up the child's ability to trust anyone). The mother doesn't need to trust the child yet in the beginning, because the child is completely helpless. She has total control over how the relationship will progress. Parents trust their children as the children get older based on an informed decision- an experience that this is what other parents do and how society works. Some parents
don't trust their kids. This is based either on their experience of their kid being untrustworthy, or on their experience of other people's kids being so (i.e., the parent who reads his teen's diary because other parents caught their kids doing drugs or having sex). It's not like our ideas for trust and mistrust come from nowhere spontaneously. We are born into a matrix of society.
Similarly, doesn't a relationship with God exist before a person comes to realize and know it? A relationship exists before the knowledge of it is gained.
Of course. However, in our decision whether or not to conciously acknowledge it (be theist or atheist), we trust in either our own experience of it (or lack thereof) or that of others' (be it the Bible, a guru, or Richard Dawkins). I don't see how there is a way around our thoughts, feelings, decisions... being guided by experience of the world around us. No man is an island. No one lives in a vacuum.