Was Demosthenes correct when he said '’We believe what we want to believe’’

Yes, absolutely. In logic it is called "confirmation bias", a fallacy. It states in essence we believe what tends to sound good and satisfies us , regardless of evidence.

Some people, maybe most people who without proper training lack the skills required for logical thought yes. But with proper skill and application one can learn to think logically. The problem is most people don't have the skill, and among those who do even less actually apply that skill.

Dear Tyto_alba, I like very much the responses you received from John_Sean and nblacksmith. And to the term 'confirmation bias' I would add Cognitive Dissonance, "the state of having inconsistent beliefs or attitudes, esp. as relating to attitude change." Psychologists say we are very uncomfortable with Cognitive Dissonance, and we struggle to make everything consistent (too often within a tight little narrow box). * * * Also, recently DarkMajinn posted a talk by Sam Harris making the case that we have no free will - to which I would add that to reclaim our free will, and open our belief system to What IS, comprises the major journey of our human life. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FanhvXO9Pk * * * Yes, Demosthenes WAS correct.

Demosthenese reincarnated as Paddy O'Rafferty and when Paddy was asked about his beliefs he said, "Oi believe what the Chorch believes." "And what does the Church believe, Paddy?" "The Chorch believes what Oi believe." We are raised to accept what our parents, pundits, priests and peers think is true until, one day, our inner Vesuvius erupts and we start to wonder whether we've been fed a load of old cobblers. At that point our thought process hits a watershed (well, a lavashed, I suppose, with due deference to that eruption) and we can take one of three courses: reason, convenience, or conformity. The second two obviously confirm your quote, but the first does not. And not even Demosthenes would have claimed that he was himself subject to believing something from sheer laziness. So my verdict on your quote? Two out of three ain't bad.

In a sense WHAT we believe and what we WANT to believe may be weighed by the relevance of what we were CONDITIONED to believe. "We believe what we want to believe" can truly only exist without preconceived notions and ideas . . . a blank slate if you will. What makes us the individuals that we are today is found in our DNA, and based off of our exposures to the Environment we lived in, but what ingrains us in our beliefs is our interactions we had with our Experiences growing up. We have all had Good, favorable, and pleasurable experiences as have also had bad, traumatic and painful experiences. Each one sculpting our malleable psyche into what it is today. - Continued in Comments -

Not really. We believe what the "practical intellect" judges to be good.

On the internet nobody knows you are a dog. When a stranger sends you a message you believe whatever you want to about his character. One scientist tells you the planets are controlled by gravity, but no scientist has ever been able to compute a stable orbit for three bodies according to gravity theory. Another scientist tells you the planets are controlled by electric charge but he is unable to explain where the charge comes from. You can not see gravity or electric charge. Both scientists are equally qualified. You know that both gravity and charge exist. How do you decide which claim to believe? We prattle a lot about racial prejudice, but if some number of random persons see a white man and a black man talking, about half of them will say the black man had a knife.

pretty much.