I Don't Believe It!
I grew up in a religious household. To be specific, my parents were members of the Self Realization Fellowship, brainchild of Yogananda, the Hindu yogi who introduced many westerners to concepts of Eastern religion back when that was a new thing for westerners to be into. And I have to say that, as religions go, it was a fairly easy one to swallow, being mostly about lifestyle and only minimally about arcane scriptural weirdness. There were things that never quite sat right with me, and though I did go to its affiliated yoga camp for 6 years as a youngster, I never adopted Yogananda as my guru.
I bring it up because belief is something which I have had increasing problems with over the last few years. And I am not talking about any particular belief, just the process of belief itself.
I posit that belief is one of humanities worse traits, right up there with jealousy, deceit, and vanity. Belief, essentially, is the process of holding onto certain ideas that are unsubstantiated simply because they are ideas that you like thinking. You don't have to believe in facts. But the thing about belief that makes it insidious isn't that it's basically an appeal to convenience fallacy that you tell yourself in perpetuity. What makes it insidious is that it is almost universally considered a normal thing to do, and encouraged.
I am not necessarily talking about religious beliefs. Atheism is a belief just as much. For that matter scientists frequently stifle their own work because they develop beliefs about their work that aren't true and have trouble realizing it.
Humans are really good at recognizing patterns [citation needed]. We are also really good at remembering things badly, sometimes to the point that we remember things that never happened. We are also really good at rationalizing our own thoughts about things, good or bad. And lastly, we are really good at attributing meaning to things in general, whether they hold any intrinsic meaning or not. The upshot is that we as a species tend to attribute meaning to patterns that may not actually exist and to events that may not have actually happened, and we feel good about our ability to do that. That's belief.
Religious belief is when a lot of people agree on some basic ideas, and this strengthens their conviction that those ideas are right. If their ideas contain any trace of violent retribution, it gets dangerous really fast.
It must occur to anyone who looks into world religions, even superficially, that there is no way that all of them are "the right one." Many religions feature a bit about being the one true religion, and yet most of them are clearly not, by definition. Most religious people seem to react to this piece of logic by concluding that, yes, most of them are wrong, because mine is right. A minority of people come to the conclusion that we live in an astral multiverse and they are all actually the one true religion, and another minority (atheists) come to the conclusion that they are all wrong because they all feature God as a part of their belief system. I am saying that they are all wrong simply for believing something in the first place.
So what can replace belief as a means of making sense of our bewildering world? Our senses are no better than our memories, in terms of fallibility, and relying on them exclusively leaves much to be desired. Belief, for better or worse, seems to act as some kind of glue for our brains -- when things in the real world fails to make sense, we make up our own things that do. And not believing in anything sounds dangerous. The existential crises would unravel us completely!
Or would it?
Questions are good questions when they are hard to answer. But that doesn't mean you have to make up an answer to every good question. It is possible to see beauty in the world without believing things about the world that explain why the beauty is there.
In my experience thus far, I've found the world a more interesting place when I free my mind from the distractions of belief. And I find that I waste less thought on doubt and existential dilemmas. I find that I sort of relate to agnosticism, ignosticism, and theological noncognitivism. But all of those also strike me as ways for people to talk themselves in circles without proving anything. Stop trying to prove. Stop questioning your beliefs. Stop having them at all.
I bring it up because belief is something which I have had increasing problems with over the last few years. And I am not talking about any particular belief, just the process of belief itself.
I posit that belief is one of humanities worse traits, right up there with jealousy, deceit, and vanity. Belief, essentially, is the process of holding onto certain ideas that are unsubstantiated simply because they are ideas that you like thinking. You don't have to believe in facts. But the thing about belief that makes it insidious isn't that it's basically an appeal to convenience fallacy that you tell yourself in perpetuity. What makes it insidious is that it is almost universally considered a normal thing to do, and encouraged.
I am not necessarily talking about religious beliefs. Atheism is a belief just as much. For that matter scientists frequently stifle their own work because they develop beliefs about their work that aren't true and have trouble realizing it.
Humans are really good at recognizing patterns [citation needed]. We are also really good at remembering things badly, sometimes to the point that we remember things that never happened. We are also really good at rationalizing our own thoughts about things, good or bad. And lastly, we are really good at attributing meaning to things in general, whether they hold any intrinsic meaning or not. The upshot is that we as a species tend to attribute meaning to patterns that may not actually exist and to events that may not have actually happened, and we feel good about our ability to do that. That's belief.
Religious belief is when a lot of people agree on some basic ideas, and this strengthens their conviction that those ideas are right. If their ideas contain any trace of violent retribution, it gets dangerous really fast.
It must occur to anyone who looks into world religions, even superficially, that there is no way that all of them are "the right one." Many religions feature a bit about being the one true religion, and yet most of them are clearly not, by definition. Most religious people seem to react to this piece of logic by concluding that, yes, most of them are wrong, because mine is right. A minority of people come to the conclusion that we live in an astral multiverse and they are all actually the one true religion, and another minority (atheists) come to the conclusion that they are all wrong because they all feature God as a part of their belief system. I am saying that they are all wrong simply for believing something in the first place.
So what can replace belief as a means of making sense of our bewildering world? Our senses are no better than our memories, in terms of fallibility, and relying on them exclusively leaves much to be desired. Belief, for better or worse, seems to act as some kind of glue for our brains -- when things in the real world fails to make sense, we make up our own things that do. And not believing in anything sounds dangerous. The existential crises would unravel us completely!
Or would it?
Questions are good questions when they are hard to answer. But that doesn't mean you have to make up an answer to every good question. It is possible to see beauty in the world without believing things about the world that explain why the beauty is there.
In my experience thus far, I've found the world a more interesting place when I free my mind from the distractions of belief. And I find that I waste less thought on doubt and existential dilemmas. I find that I sort of relate to agnosticism, ignosticism, and theological noncognitivism. But all of those also strike me as ways for people to talk themselves in circles without proving anything. Stop trying to prove. Stop questioning your beliefs. Stop having them at all.