[John Freestone]

I'm struggling with this:

Originally Posted by mercuryrising

Your thinking starts with the assumption of what people believe and you take their beliefs at face value. Like an LOA 'true believer' thinks that Santa is a big guy in a red suit who lives at the North Pole. Or, to step out of this analogy, that I can just sit around thinking about money and it will come to me.

So that sounds like you aren't such a 'true believer', you don't believe we can just sit around, think about money and it will come to us...but

In my opinion, LOA is part of the larger concept that is 'you create your own reality'. As I've stated it previously, what you believe you will summon the evidence to prove.

Why wouldn't that include sitting around thinking about money and making it come to us (assuming you believe it); why would the belief that I can manifest money not summon the evidence to prove it? What you seem to have done is present (in the first quote) a view that manifestation of intention works by affecting behaviour - then (in the second quote) a view of Magical LoA: belief creates reality. Is it one or the other, both, or have I misunderstood?

Oddly enough, I think that skepticism would not counter this idea. Any line of reason leads back to an assertion accepted as self-evident. That assertion can be questioned or countered with other assertions, which is skepticism in a nutshell.

That's quite an astute observation, and I think it may be approximately right. But that is taking thinking out of life where it can happily go round in circles without bumping into anything. The point I have been trying to make is that science is the process of testing those assertions - where they bump up against reality and get repeatedly chucked out. While I take your point that santa claus can be believed in metaphorically, the fact that you (presumably) don't believe in him physically is a good example. Children do science when they stay awake to catch their parents putting presents under the tree, and only foolish, dim or badly misguided ones still believe the big fat man in red and white comes down the chimney at xmas by the time they're at uni.

Where I would differ with skepticism is in the assertion that logic and empirical data are the true basis of reality. A skeptic accepts this assertion a priori just like everyone else accepts their beliefs in the same manner. There is no human being that sees things as they are, they project a belief onto it and skeptics is not an exception.

Most of that is very astute too - few thinkers get as far as recognising that reason and logic may be doubted just as everything else may be. But I think you make a bit of a mistake when that leads you to

That being the case, what this is all about is consciously choosing what we believe.

...I'll have to put this better - I mean, yes, philosophically speaking, maybe all theories about life are equally doubt-able, none absolutely certain, and even reason may be a foul knave, but the question is how are we going to choose our beliefs. You could as easily imply that we should just choose them at random, or choose whatever beliefs make us happy, ignoring all testing and thinking because testing and thinking are not 100% rock solid. Sure, you're aware of the danger of becoming obsessively rationalistic and never settling anywhere (although I personally feel that is quite a good way to be if one can take the strain - didn't someone once say belief is the worst enemy of knowledge?) - but choosing to believe that whatever you believe will be (or tend to create) reality seems a rather unecessary flight in the opposite direction.

For most people, they take what they are given in terms of belief. They question it when it no longer serves them or (in the case of skepticism) when inquiry itself serves them better. That's why so many people come on this forum wondering how this works. It's also why people like you and John come here berating people for it not working.

That's right, I'm concerned because I see it as very unlikely to be true, being popularized as the truth by certain folk, and I see some people "taking what they are given in terms of belief" - from people like Steve.

I would bet that any skeptic on close inspection began by question her own beliefs because they were no longer 'working' for her. Being unable to find a new belief system, she opts for the questioning of all belief systems. In the end though, this is also a belief system.

Again, that is only if someone becomes obessed with not sitting with a favorite theory and saying "That'll do for a while" or "That's my best guess at the moment". That isn't necessarily the definition of a sceptic, just an obsessive one. I think you can be sceptic to different degrees, at one end never trusting any assumption, believing nothing, at the other being almost fixed, but just keeping a little bit of an open mind. Another interesting observation from that is that if you do what cylon's linked page said "Don't doubt", you are quite clearly closed minded; that little chink of healthy scepticism has sealed shut (for now, it could open again). That's another insidious thing about the LoA. Like a lot of religions, it tells you it is the truth and the more you stop trying to worry about whether it might or might not be the truth and just accept it as the truth, the more it will become the truth. In that sense, sure, you get what you believe.

LoAers often seem deeply critical of religion, especially christianity, and I'm afraid I can't help but see enormous similarities. The details are mostly quite different, although even some of them are the same. Become like little children. Blessed is the one who believes and does not know. Just stop thinking critically; read the texts. Having a crisis of faith? - pray harder. We'll all pray for you. Signs and portents. It's magic, but it only seems like magic. Its the secret hidden reality behind normal (illusory) reality; come, join the special ones who seeeee.