Are some beliefs stupid?

[Captain Jacqui Sparrow]

People usually say that everyone's entitled to their own beliefs, that an opinion can't be right or wrong, etc. But then you have some people who open their mouths or take out their keyboards and just make no sense at all. So do you think some beliefs or opinions are just plain stupid? Would you ever call somebody's beliefs stupid? I wanna know what you people think. 

[Allie]

Though I hate to say it, I think there are stupid beliefs. I do think that everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but some are just too ridiculous. They have a right to believe them, but I wish they wouldn't.

[Emma Ruen]

I just find them all funny.

[Randy James Patterson]

Though guilty as hell of this, I think the act of belief is, essentially, stupid. It admits by its very definition that you treat a guess as fact. This is absolutely necessary in the human experience. For instance, there is no way for me to prove that between this breath and the next one, some fatal gas wont enter the room and kill me. I'll keep breathing anyway, but you see my point, hopefully. My eyes could be lying to me. I choose to believe them. In a way, i think we're doomed to stupidity in the normal human way of going about things. but that's cool because as soon as somebody challenges any of the false assumptions we base our world view on, we get a very satisfying paradigm shift and usually feel healthier for it.

[Captain Jacqui Sparrow]

I don't see your point. You don't believe that toxic gas is not going to enter your room within the next few seconds. You find it terribly unlikely and improbable that it will not enter your room within the next few seconds, and that the chances are so in your favor that you really don't have much to risk by breathing, because by not breathing, you have a pretty high chance of death assuming that you don't just hold your breath like an angry 3-year-old. But yeah. Belief in something and rolling with probability are different things. Probability is fact. Opinion is opinion.

I don't see how opinions in general are stupid. Opinions are things like, "I think that all people look good in the color turquoise." Nothing probable about it. Nothing that's close to being proven either way, like whether or not your room will be pumped with cyanide within the next few minutes, in which you can calculate the approximate probability of it happening. You can't prove that everyone on Earth looks good in turquoise or not. It's simply how somebody feels about something. That's the thing about opinions: they aren't facts.

[Randy James Patterson]

Yeah but i'm already operating within a world of incredible improbability. for instance, what was the probability that I would be the lucky product of that one particular sperm during conception. that's already a 1 in over a (idk the numbers nor my dad's sperm count). not to mention that it was that particular sperm on that particular day and none of the other days that it was.. spilled into a napkin, for instance.

probability is a mental tool for making decisions but doesnt assign or identify truth. that's the cool part because we've somehow survived on all these bad assumptions since the dawn of time. Nature doesnt care what you believe so long as you eventually reproduce. Science (and spirituality, to quote Contact) is the search for truth. Belief, you might say, can be boiled down to an operational opinion. I believe (X) so i will behave in a certain way. (X) may or may not be. But if I believe it is in the room and, say, hold my breath till I die.. how is that any different from assuming that god exists even when your life is in peril for voicing such a belief? If i really believe god exists and i choose to lay down my life rather than deny him, say, to avoid the eternal fires of hell, i'm really choosing between experiential evils. a bullet is preferable to eternal hell fire, i'd guess. just like normal asphyxia i assume would be preferable to a cyanide death. The interesting part is when experience takes us beyond our expectations and beliefs. say i really believed cyanide was in the room but at the last moment i faltered and inhaled, only to discover there was never any cyanide in the room; or denied god, was shot and killed, only to discover that god loved me anyway or didnt exist or that i was god..

my point is that belief should always take a back seat to experience.

[VictorTheWondrousFiendOfHumanity]

seeing that i haven't read the comments before this one, and my views will be possibly vulnerable, i at least will say them. everyone has their own beliefs, and to say that one person's belief is less wise or *stupid* to another's is just hypocrisy. trying to discredit someone's beliefs only results in complication and disaster. no one is perfect, and no one will ever be perfect. the least we can do is to get through life without flaming people that we see as inferior to us. they live with those beliefs for a reason, and you live with your beliefs for a reason. live with each other.

[Randy James Patterson]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa_QC37ifjU