Tuesday, August 26
Belief = trust + fact + truth + choice + experience + faith + relevance + comfort - pain?
It hit me the other day that what we believe is based on a few different things. I’ve tried to simplify it (complicate it?), but the more I do, the more intricate it gets. I guess a simple way of summing up would be to say that we live by what we believe, which may go against what we know is true…
trust: we hear or read things and we decide whether we trust them enough to believe (faith) them or not. Fact: either through reading or hearing things or through personal or passed-on experience, we gather facts, which we choose to trust and believe or not (while there are factual facts, we may dismiss them as irrelevant to our lives, and hence choose not to trust them). Choice: everything we see, hear, read and believe, we decide whether, based on what we know and have heard, we choose to believe (take as fact or faith) or not. Experience: personal or passed-on, we know things (take them as fact) by what we go through or see others go through. Despite this we may choose to ignore facts and repeat certain behaviours despite the consequences (choice). Faith: what we choose to believe or not comes down to faith. While we have facts and theories, we can choose to believe something or not, depending on how it affects us or what changes might need to be made in our lives, despite what the “truth” is. There are also areas that are “unproven” or “grey” and our choice of belief will determine our faith. Relevance: in all these things, we will only “believe” or “trust” or “live by” things, which are relevant to us. Comfort, value, pleasure and pain may be the determining factors in what is relevant to us. The “truth” is that “facts” that are “irrelevant” to me because of the “pain” they may cause me, I can “choose” to dismiss and have “faith” that my “choice” won’t lead to a worse (more painful) “experience”. But then again, that’s only what I believe…
