Greetings,

Below are some terms related to believing and beliefs. They come from the Apple Dictionary 1.01 ed.
Since some of these terms show up alot here at the AK website, perhaps we need to look at what they mean.

Where would you place yourself in regard to this continuum of 'skeptical to gullible' ?
Are these true definitions or just points of view?
Can we even have hard and fast definitions on something as personal as beliefs ?  :-?

Dictionary
“skeptic
noun
1 a person inclined to question or doubt all accepted opinions.

2 Philosophy an ancient or modern philosopher who denies the possibility of knowledge, or even rational belief, in some sphere.

Thesaurus
“skeptic
cynic, doubter; pessimist, prophet of doom.

“Dictionary
gullible
adjective
easily persuaded to believe something; credulous :
antonym: suspicious.

“RELATED WORDS:
callow, credulous, gullible, ingenuous, naive, trusting, unsophisticated
Some people will believe anything.
Those who are truly gullible are the easiest to deceive, which is why they so often make fools of themselves.
Those who are merely credulous might be a little too quick to believe something, but they usually aren't stupid enough to act on it.
Trusting suggests the same willingness to believe (: a trusting child), but it isn't necessarily a bad way to be
( | a person so trusting he completely disarmed his enemies).
No one likes to be called naive because it implies a lack of street smarts (: she's so naive she'd accept a ride from a stranger), but when applied to things other than people, it can describe a simplicity and absence of artificiality that is quite charming ( | the naive style in which nineteenth-century American portraits were often painted).
Most people would rather be thought of as ingenuous, meaning straightforward and sincere (: an ingenuous confession of the truth), because it implies the simplicity of a child without the negative overtones.
Callow, however, comes down a little more heavily on the side of immaturity and almost always goes hand-in-hand with youth.



Bets

Hi bets I can relate to the naive,as i was very naive years ago and also gullible as well but i married this man because of these two words and now im divorcing him after 34yrs and if i had not been this two words ,i would not have taken so long to divorce him and realise that in all those years ,he never cared about me.

I sometimes think sceptics are afraid to beleive and hide behind that they dont beleive or that they just dont beleive anyway.

Love and God bless   Love juditha

Bets-

Gullibility comes to mind when I think of someone like Sylvia Browne.  It's heartbreaking to think of the countless number of people who been hurt both financially and emotionally by a fraud like her.  She preys on those suffering from grief, and tells them any old thing that comes into her head.  

Yes, many of those people are gullible, but their judgment is clouded by grief and despair.  And along comes Browne to take advantage of them.  When she detects vulnerability, it's like a shark detecting blood.

As for me, I would much rather be a skeptic than to be gullible.  There's an old saying, "don't believe everything you hear, and only half of what you see."  

We should have an open mind about things we don't understand, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use a filter to sort out the legitimate stuff from the fraudulent.  Same thing with a car.....if we remove the oil filter, the engine sooner or later gets clogged up with all kinds of junk and ultimately stops functioning.

R

Roger,

I once travelled with Loren Cunningham, a Christian missionary whose life was uniquely empowered by miracles.  For example, during a missionary foray into the Amazon region, he would be praying for an Indian woman to be healed of her cataracts.  He then noticed her eyes brighten as the cataracts dissolved.  The native witnesses to this miracle became extremely excited and Loren sensed an opportunity to present the Christian faith to them.  But there was a big problem: he didn't know their language.  Ah, but God allowed him to preach to them in their own language through speaking in tongues and, as a result, some were converted. Loren would later discover what had transpired through an interpreter.

Impressed by Loren's unique faith, I asked him about the secret of his success. His answer surprised me.  He replied, "My secret is this: I realized that God couldn't use me in a miraculous way unless I was truly willing to become an atheist."  What he meant was this: true spiritual openness requires a willingness to abandon one's comfort zone and be open to feelings of skepticism and disillusionment.  Gullibility arises from the elevation of comfort as a higher priority than truth.  The biblical terms translated as "faith" really mean "faithfulness" instead--faithfulness to one's spiritual quest.  One consequence of this is to trivialize the importance of deep-seated convictions and belief in dogma.  What matters more is the intensity, passion, and purity of one's longing for mystical union with God.  This longing can not only be plagued by doubt; it can be fueled by doubt.  In the Bible, the emotional setting for this longing is poetically symboiized by the "desert wandering" (= the dark night of the soul), which depicts the dry and empty phases that intensify this longing.  It is this longing--not mental faith--that bonds us with God's Spirit in a way that allows us to channel blessings and miracles to others.  Mental faith creates an insidious need to finalize our belief system prematurely in a way that blocks further divine illumination and guidance.  But the right kind of longing allows us to passionately obsess about our burning questions until they lead us to the heart of God.  Doubts are nothing; mystical experience is everything!

Don

That's a very Buddhist sentiment Don!!  :)

There's a Buddhist saying (which is roughly)  'don't mistake the pointing finger for the Moon'.

Another is 'if you meet the Buddha kill him'.

i.e. no matter what system of teaching helps you along the way (and there are views that help along the way) it must in the end be discarded for the unconditioned belief-free consciousnes that realisation requires....

Don-

Of all the years I've been on this website, I can honestly say I've never read a post as eloquent and illuminating as yours. It meant a lot to me.  Thank you.

Somehow I suspect that God does not want an army of obsequious followers any more than a loving parent would want a child to become slavishly dependent and obedient.  And few things compare with the way that a parent feels when his child, after years of rebelling and even abandoning him, and acting in ways the parent would never approve, at long last comes back with a tear in his eye and his arms extended in a loving embrace.  The parent is overcome with joy.

How much more would such a coming together mean in the eyes of God.