I do not believe in believing. I don’t know what I believe in and I don’t care what you believe in. I do believe, however, that believing leads to an addling of the brain. We are not supposed to believe. We are supposed to learn, as in, look at evidence and make conclusions. I prefer to be reality based. Belief can be and is usually manufactured from thin air. And like thin air, belief is prone to flimsy shifts in the wind.
Belief is, to me, but one step away from superstition and prejudice, two of its most common components. Belief motivates people—usually to do something awful. People of Salem, Massachusetts believed in witches and a dozen women died for it. The newest attack on LGBT rights is that our freedom violates somebody’s religious beliefs which they believe should be forced on everybody else.
We’ve all heard it on the nightly news. You get a one-minute story on some horrific event like a man is suspected of abusing his children and right away, the TV anchors want to know what you believe. Let us know what you think, they say. Is he guilty?
My belief however flimsily arrived at or sincerely held is irrelevant and not really even worth considering. If I am ever to judge this man, I will be on a jury that has been presented with the full facts of the case for our consideration. Otherwise, I am not really entitled to an opinion and any opinion I give is worthless. I can believe all I want, but, so what?
Believing is manipulated and it is so very manipulable. Belief easily descends into hysteria. Muslims in New York want to open a religious center near the World Trade Center site and suddenly we are talking about the global radical Islamist conspiracy to desecrate sacred sites in the homeland. I didn’t know we had sacred sites and if we do, isn’t it WalMart.
© 11 January 2016
About the Author
No comments:
Post a Comment