Belief is a funny thing. We need to believe in something, it is built into our nature. Religious people formalize their beliefs with written histories that revolve around God, and ritualistic behaviors meant to appease him/her. Scientific people believe in un-provable theories that conform to observation. Rational people believe in their observations, which is a leap of faith in-an-of itself. Mathematicians believe in their abstract constructions that occasionally have a correlation to reality.
We are trapped in this reality of ours, and belief gives us something to think about beyond what we can sense. I will refer to that as a 'meta-reality' without making any claim about it's existence, but as a concept that fits into our fundamental belief that something exists beyond our own reality. But a belief is simply that: 'a belief'. There is nothing to prove it, nothing to give us any assumption that it is true. So how do we consider ourselves rational creatures, when so much of our view of the world is a belief. What makes a belief good? For me, a belief is good if it fulfills a need and it doesn't cause harm.
I equate belief to food. Sort of nourishment for the soul if my reader might forgive me a bit if poetic frivolity. True you wont die in a few weeks if you don't have any beliefs, but you will probably not thrive and you will be plagued with a vague hunger that will probably manifest itself as an unease that is hard to define. Marx is paraphrased as saying 'Religion is the opium of the masses'. Perhaps he was being a little hard on people who hunger to believe in something. Perhaps the quote was aimed more at the established religions, and I will agree with him there. Many organized religions peddle their specific beliefs like drug dealers, as a way to obtain power without earning it.
Even atheists who are often considered the ultimate non-believers, believe that God does not exist, which is a statement about meta-reality, or even a denial of any sort of meta-reality. Either way it is a belief about the nature of the un-observable. I suspect that many atheists are in fact deists, but simply despise established religions as a con-game where we sell snake-oil that feeds our hunger for a belief in something. For me personally, the idea that this is no meta-reality is akin to the idea that the sun revolves around us, and we are the center of the universe. So I must argue for a meta-reality without any proof or observable phenomenon, simply based on an extrapolation of the past mistakes of our vanity. I should, at this point define reality as that which is observable, and meta-reality as an extension of that which is not observable. We might even define a new term which I will lightheartedly call the googlety which is the combination of reality, the hypothetical meta-reality, and meta-realities of meta-reality. This does sort of smack of the 'Turtles all the way down' expression, but an infinite expansion of meta-realities has a bit more of an air of seriousness about it.
So what makes a belief good? I'm going to stretch my food analogy a bit more, and say a belief is good if it satisfies a need, and it does no harm. So if your belief is all dessert, it may make you feel better in the moment, but could cause problems that build up over time. If your belief is poisonous, it may even hasten your demise. I like to believe in an afterlife simply because it fills a need, and does me no harm. I like to believe in a judgement by a higher power, simply because it allows me to tolerate my helplessness to resolve many injustices, and it allows me to add extra motivation to ethical behavior. I like to believe that my body is a shell for my spirit as a hermit crab moves into a shell, and perhaps moves from shell to shell as it grows. Again, my rational for these beliefs is 'why not?'. I don't worry excessively about being wrong about these things, as I fully admit that I may well be and don't care.
It's the people that have trouble admitting that they may be wrong that I have to watch out for. Not only will they judge me as absolutely wrong, they will condemn me to some terrible after-life that is segregated by our ability to guess what is unobservable. Like a cosmic game of Let's make a deal, we have to decide between curtain number one, curtain number two, or curtain number three. The worst of these people that are tolerance-impaired may dehumanize me and wish to hurry my deliverance to the after-life. At the very least they may knock on my door while I'm busy blogging in a futile attempt to save me, but instead simply waste my time and break my train of thought.
There still is one problem: believing in belief. While beliefs are a natural aspect of our psyche, when you've pondered the world as much as I have, it's hard not to belittle your beliefs as simply whistling in the graveyard. Perhaps as I grow older, and face my meta-reality, I will learn better to suspend my dis-belief.
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