There is much talk in this country about belief. It is often paired with the idea of freedom. Freedom of belief has become a tenet we live by and cherish. Belief is a fascinating part of human nature as it is the lever pulled by which everything else that has to do with behavior is placed in to motion. The moment someone even remotely resembling a fire chief enters your house unannounced to proclaim you have five minutes to get out because the house is about to collapse on your head, is the moment a belief must be welcomed. If you decide to believe him you will also act, presumably by getting out of your own house as fast as you can. Remember, these were mere words strung together by a complete stranger. I would venture that any reasonable person would act accordingly even if they had a priest, or Rabbi, or Imam, over for tea and this religious authority told them to sit tight as God would never allow this to happen. More than this, I would bet my life that any of these three men would act the same as you. Nothing wakes us out of the slumber of what to really believe about the world when it has everything to do with self-preservation. This is a case of reality (as well as the probability in reality) forcing itself upon you without the benefit of freedom. However, as much as we say we cherish all belief, we are very often quick to decide for others they do not really believe what they do. This is a strange inversion to our idea of the freedom it contains. We do this when it has behavioural consequences we do not like. This is when we forget a very important aspect of belief: for belief to actually work it must go a long way in objectively understanding how the world actually appears.
Take religious belief. If you are a fairly educated young man who truly believes an omniscient creator of the universe has written—or at least dictated-- the penultimate book on the way the world should be, that young man will heed it completely. If this book is filled with lots of gibberish about this creator having enemies on earth you must believe this too. If there is even vague (it’s not that vague) talk of god hating these enemies so much so that it is his follower’s job to kill these enemies, this must also be acted upon. When a young man truly believes these things, it should not be a surprise when he, along with fellow believers, takes a petroleum-filled Jumbo 747 aircraft and use it as a bomb by flying it in to buildings.
Are we appalled by this kind of act? Of course we are. It is against every fiber of our ethical intuition. This ethical intuition, I would also argue, precedes even the authority of some books. We also know intuitively it does not bring about a better world for everyone. We tacitly or otherwise know this is wrong and wrong for all the wrong reasons. But what has this young man done in relation to what he believes about the world? For one, according to his belief, he has done his family a great service. According to the book he reads as his world view, it is very difficult to get into paradise after death but with his one act, he has now given his family and himself a direct ticket to heaven. Not a bad deal on the face of things. He has assured them eternal nirvana after death. He has also done the world a great service. Sure, he killed innocent people but these were the enemies of god, after all.
He has actually improved on the world. He has also pleased the creator of this world. In this sense, according to his belief, someone who flies a plane into a building for god must be seen as a very altruistic person. Of course, this is obscene. He has not made the world a better place. This, coupled with the real fact that his reasons are highly unlikely, pushes the obscenity to the dangerous. If this sounds shocking I only say it to highlight the point that there is rarely a person out there acting like some Austin Powers villain hoping to finally spread evil around the world. Even the most ridiculous claims purport to actually benefit the world. This again should further highlight how important beliefs really are in the world. But we are most likely agreed that if our goal is to build a better world, holding such absurd beliefs is not the way to go about it.
Why is the above so insane? For one we just know it’s wrong to kill innocent people for utterly terrible reasons. But because we are so adamant about holding on to our freedom of beliefs, even our irrational ones, we decide that this could not possibly be what they believed. And this is even though these young men and those like him are constantly telling us these are the beliefs he holds. So we come up with other plausible reasons as if they acted for political reasons or that they were brainwashed. We decide to differentiate beliefs based on what the behavioural outcomes are despite the fact that they may both be logically insane. As an example, I once watched an episode of Bill O’Reilly’s news show. He was interviewing an author who was known for his strong religious criticism. In a moment of uncharacteristic clarity, Bill O’Reilly made the point that to kill innocent people in the World Trade Center in the hopes of receiving paradise after death was just plain crazy. It’s a crazy belief to own. When the author reminded the catholic O’Reilly it was no more implausible than a cracker turning into the body of a man, O’Reilly protested that at least the latter did no one harm. It was pointed out by the author that this was just due to the behavioural outcomes, but, alas, O’Reilly either didn’t seem to understand this point or he decided he didn’t want his own beliefs challenged.
This is interesting because here we can say the young men truly believed because they acted upon it. After all, we also base the strength of a belief claim on how it is acted upon. I believe strongly in curing cancer. I then give money to cancer foundations. It’s then believed I mean what I say. Shouldn’t we who champion freedom of belief be impressed with such strength of conviction that those who hold it also act on it? According to O’Reilly it was just fine to believe in transubstantiation as long as it did not have negative outcomes. I suppose this is innocent enough. But as far as interpreting the world correctly (aside from behavioural consequences) believing martyrdom gets you eternal paradise stands in the same relation to the idea that a cracker turns into a man. As we know, the belief does not end there. We can take any notion of action out of the equation and see these two beliefs baldly in similar light. Two competing claims are set side by side. But we only make a value judgment on their truth value based on whether one is acted upon or whether one is just held within the closed bosom of private belief. However, the warm embrace of privacy does not make something true.
It’s worth noting that partaking in this cracker will itself also result in paradise. It might be as equally worthy to note that many Jews did lose their lives at many points in history simply for being accused of “host desecration.” The belief was so strongly believed that action was taken in defense of it. The belief was so strongly held that it inspired action in the form of anyone defaming the belief would be set on fire in the town square. The only reason this does not happen anymore is not because we have looked closer in to the reliability of the belief but rather we have tempered our actions by not taking it so seriously. O’Reilly’s comments are a good example of this very thing.
We now live in a world where we can mostly afford to have beliefs without worrying about consequences simply because we do not take them as seriously. This includes believing a witch put the evil eye on you or that certain stars are aligned in a way that will prove you will find your true love. As long as the downtrodden hobo on the corner only claims it and nothing else, we smile politely that he believes aliens are sending transmissions through his hair follicles. We walk away from him. These are in fact benign. Of course, we also don’t clean up our tramp and invite him to Thanksgiving so he can pontificate further on these pesky aliens. This appears to be freedom belief in a sense, I suppose. It is certainly not respect for them. But imagine the first time a man refuses cancer treatment because he claims Saturn is not in retrograde with Neptune. His behavior has put his belief, the very same belief he might have had before his decision, in to new light. But the belief has not changed. What would have changed is his behavior which, in principle anyway, should only serve to strengthen an outsider’s notion that he really believes it. But we only question the sanity of his action. We leave the belief alone.
As an example of how we can partition our views on belief and whether they have real world consequences or not, ponder a silly scenario:
Imagine you are at a party, a festive get together where everyone is having a good time. You are a little self-conscious as you don’t know many people but you are willing to mingle and hope to make friends. You walk in to a room of nice people chatting and you see an empty chair so you decide to take it and hope to instill yourself into the conversation. Before you can sit down you are politely told that the lone empty chair is actually occupied by somebody’s invisible friend, Jimmy. Of course, this might sound crazy but for the fact that everyone in the room seems to agree with this so you acquiesce. You may take part in the illusion as you are there to make friends. Besides, you are slightly embarrassed, but not put out completely, by standing next to an empty chair presumably taken up by an invisible entity. No skin off your nose.
But imagine the same scenario if you ran into the room with your injured child who needed a seat right away. If you were told even politely that the seat was taken by Jimmy, it seems a good bet your reaction would not be awkward politeness. You more than likely will have decided it is not true. You will have plopped your kid down whether Jimmy likes it or not. But here is where a certain fancy pirouette of belief is executed. It will more than likely then be mentioned that Jimmy understood the importance of giving up the seat and got up accordingly. We had an invisible entity taking up a chair and before we know it, he also knows the importance of etiquette. Invisible Jimmy's attributes have now been compounded. This is a good example of a false belief begetting another belief. One might be tempted to compare this to how lying leads to other lies. If this were the beginning of a religion it would not be too long before competing claims were made over Jimmy. More than this, it might not be long before wars are started over him. May be with time his body will turn in to something edible.
This is the cognitive dissonance of belief. One might argue that it is perfectly fine to partition our views on belief this way. However, my argument is that as long as we allow anyone to believe what they want without real world proof to back it up, we also make it difficult to criticize those beliefs that are acted upon with negative consequences (Imagine me arguing that Jimmy did not get up quick enough or that he was rude many times after this scenario). Therefore it is often argued, especially by the more liberally minded, that it is not religious beliefs that fanatics act upon. By denying this—and I will remind again, they are telling us what they believe---we get no closer to understanding real motives.
Freedom is a good thing. We want people to believe what they want to believe. More to the point, we do not want to put constraints on it. But this only becomes true in a legal sense. We also demand some proof for reasons why they believe what they do. Freedom of belief that has no real world consequences essentially just means we do not jail people for holding stupid views.
Am I free to believe Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president? Am I free to deny it? I am but I’m also at the mercy of not being invited back to the table of Civil War discussions. I am free to be laughed at. At the same time I am not necessarily free to believe it. I am actually a slave to historical documentation. I am bound by proof. I am shackled to truths in the world.
Much importance has been put on the idea of a person’s subjective views. Everyone, we think, can have their own private beliefs. We in America live in a country where we rightly do not want to put Orwellian limits on what a person believes. However, we must remember that, like a good deal of the aspects of freedom, this comes with responsibilities. The conundrum of the responsibility of the freedom of belief is that we are mostly responsible in realizing we don’t really have it. There is a world out there that works a certain way whether we agree with it or not. If your belief does not take this into consideration you are in danger of being very wrong. We can trace this back to an evolutionary standpoint. Believe that you can keep walking beyond the cliff side you find yourself at and you will find reality elicit a rude awakening upon you. No matter your views on gravity, it will have put real world constraints on you.
The danger of a skewed freedom of belief is when we allow everyone to have their own view at the expense of objective proof. Though many of these may be benign they still, by my view, can give cover to those that are much more dangerous. The important thing to do is a hard one and one that goes against each individual will. That is the desire to believe things based on wishful thinking rather than the real. Many might see this as a kind of fatalism but it does not mean we cannot change things. On the contrary, seeing and believing things rightly should give us clarity and, therefore, allow us more power to change things for the better. We can still make a difference in the world. This is not restricting. This can set us free.
Replete with electric love and filled with