What We Believe

Scott Schaeffer-Duffy's piece, Scrooge and the Jobless Recovery, is one of the more well-reasoned and noteworthy exercises in Christian explication that I've come across in quite some time.

These days, there is such an abundance of CINO's out there (Christians In Name Only), that Scott's piece is like a breath of fresh air.

For myself, I'm not a Christian. I don't go to any church, and I don't hold fast to any particular faith in God, Jesus, Allah, the promise of enlightenment, or the promise of salvation... but I hardly find those who do have faith in any of those things to be better or worse off than I.

What I believe is that we believe what suits us.

Through personal experiences and the various avenues of gathering information from without as we grow into adulthood, eventually there's a point where one can decide what world view would suit them best. The conclusions that people come to will be as varied and unique as there are people. These are mutable conclusions, too. They could change with the personal experience of coming into possession of new information. For instance, how would one whose firm belief that aliens from some other planet do not exist change if a flying saucer landed on their front lawn? How would a dyed-in-the-wool atheist respond to the word of God booming in their face?

Well, it's impossible to say in advance how anyone would respond to such an utterly shattering experience, such a profound experience of some new reality slamming squarely into the face of their deepest beliefs. I've had lesser experiences of reality adjustment over the course of my life, and take my word for it, being shattered and run through the process of complete cognitive dissonance is a difficult journey, one that either leaves you insane or changed forever.

It hasn't killed me, for instance, that I've been unable to find any decent gainful employment in over seven and half years, after having spent a lifetime of never having the slightest difficulty finding and keeping decent jobs. But I feel somewhat emasculated by this recent experience, and the pressure to simply give up has been nearly overwhelming. That I haven't given up, however, is a product of who I have chosen to be, and what I have chosen to believe.

What I believe is that nearly all successful religions have been born out of a need to resolve the perceived ills of humankind, to make sense of the chaos that societies can so easily plunge into, and to provide a way up and out. And I believe that the practice of nearly all successful religions have predicated their success on doing exactly what they were first expected to do by their earliest adherents.

But I also believe that successful religious practices, nearly all of them, have eventually been subverted to other purposes in their subsequent organizing, and in the gathering of power. Usually, the goal of salvation, enlightenment, or maybe even just being able to make sense of the world, these goals that originally reside on the high moral ground, they eventually become subordinate to the purpose of control of the many by the few...

It's done because it CAN be done.

And I believe that science is no different. As an answer with a methodology, a practice, it grew out of the need to understand the universe and to try to answer the great questions of life, just like any religion has. And it has predicated its success on the workability of its practice, just as any religion has. And, like every religion before it, it has been just as easily subverted to the purposes of control over the many by the few.

The high priests of this new religion aren't my focus here, though. It's what WE believe... all of us who are not ministers or priests of any organized church, those of us who are not scientists, who are the focus of this essay...

We believe it or not. They tell us that God came down from the heavens and gave Moses the law, and we either believe this or we don't, depending on what our personal preferences are... what we choose to accept as real. This is no different with any science, when presented to us as non-scientists. The proof of how we choose to believe what science tells us or not is the simple fact of existence, ie- those who do not accept Evolutionary Theory, or the Big Bang Theory, etc. It's the process of acceptance, the subjective choice that I'm talking about here.

Why? Why do people not believe in one thing or another? Because they choose not to. Belief and faith is entirely subjective, whether one is dealing with belief and faith in God, or a belief and faith in science, or even a belief and faith in one's own infallibility. The entirety of this part of life and living is subjective. It can no more be proven or dis-proven by "science" than whether someone truly loves another.

Completely separate from what we believe is what we have for technology. For instance, the local Catholic Bishop has a technology that is just as precise and rigorous for the performance of a High Mass, as the rigorous and precise technology used by a scientist to sequence DNA. And those technological practices both produce their predictable results, too. So, how can the adherent of one practice assail the validity of the other? And most especially, how can the adherent of one school of thought assail the adherent of the other as being without merit?

Only by their own chosen standard of subjective reality, can anyone do this.

I've spent my whole life wrestling with the practical side of religious tolerance. It's an amazingly difficult concept to apply in real life. And yet, religious tolerance is supposedly such a fundamental aspect of the American experience, that I wonder why we don't talk about it more.

I mean, when somebody knocks on my door in the belief that what they believe is something that I have to believe, too, otherwise I'm doomed... I don't feel so tolerant. When someone comes along and insists that I have to believe what they believe, otherwise they feel obligated to kill me, I don't feel tolerant at all.

In this wise, I tend to believe that what we choose to believe is entirely personal. Subjective reality is, entirely, a personal view. Sometimes I can find someone who has a view that seems to correspond with something I subjectively believe to be in some way valid, and there seems to be a pleasant sensation that can be associated with this phenomenon. We seem to agree.

It's a very nice thing to have others agree with us. It's pleasing.

But when someone disagrees with me, it's not so pleasing. This is a very simple and observable phenomenon of experience.

When it comes to what we believe, however, if we really do believe it, having someone exist out there who doesn't believe the same thing is hardly debatable... There will always be someone out there who doesn't believe everything that you hold near and dear. So, the most important question here is: Why would anyone have a problem with that?

I believe that when someone has a problem with you not believing in what they believe in, it's clear evidence that they don't really believe it. It's evidence that their faith is weak. It's evidence that they are seeking reinforcement by trying to prove the power of what they believe being SO powerful that all they have to do is reveal this to you, and you'll suddenly believe it, too.

I believe that this is the root of all the evil that seems to come out of "religion"... these so-called "true believers" who insist that it's their way or the highway. The people whose "certainty" is so highly professed that YOU will be toast if you don't also believe... I believe that this is one of the most basic evils in the world.

It is the basic evil that takes over successful religions and subverts their original message into a method of control, where blind obedience to authority takes precedence.

It isn't belief at all. It's giving up. It's giving in to total subservience and slavery. I believe that there's a vast difference between that lazy excuse for "true faith" and what true faith and belief are actually all about.

What we believe is what we really, truly do believe, not what we would insist that everybody else believe.

So, after all these years of living and experiencing the various ways that others express their beliefs, I occasionally run into something that I find to be exceptional evidence of the good in humankind, and of the power that personal faith can bring to the betterment of the human experience. Today, that evidence is Scott Schaeffer-Duffy's piece, which I linked to at the beginning.

Reading that piece has moved me to write this one.

Thank you, Scott, for being real.