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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I start out very young being very confident that there is a God. I expect that because God does exist I will get a response. I get none and then rationalize this result to myself in order to reconcile the existence of God (which I still believe in) and the lack of response.

I had the opposite problem. I had no faith there was a God. But I got responses, and then had to rationalise out where they might be coming from.

Since I wasn't willing to put my complete trust in directives from an unknown source, but instead I insisted on judging the responses by my own best judgement, I eventually decided it didn't matter what the source was or whether it was connected to a god who made universes etc. As long as I judged I was getting better advice than I'd make for myself, it was worth paying attention to independent of the source. And that happened with fair consistency. When I rejected the godly responses it was consistently because I didn't want to be that good a person.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Suppose for a moment that to have any sort of spiritual experience (e.g., getting a response) requires faith. Faith comes first (that's the nature of it---believing without direct evidence), and the evidence comes second.I might have misrepresented myself. I start out very young being very confident that there is a God. I expect that because God does exist I will get a response. I get none and then rationalize this result to myself in order to reconcile the existence of God (which I still believe in) and the lack of response. In that situation I had a preference over belief. I wished to continue believing despite the evidence. It wasn't until over a decade later that I decided to honestly weight the evidence and see if I truly though it was most probable that God exists or merely wished to believe, and found that I didn't.

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