Belief

On the other hand, religious fanatics, superstitious beliefs, taking everything for gospel, implicit confidence, naive faith, blind belief. These are the two different sides of the same coin. So what is belief? Is it good or evil, advantageous or disadvantageous, does the society benefit from it? We have already got used to such phrases as “faith undergirds morals” and often hear that “Christian virtues are faith, hope and charity”. We have accustomed ourselves to the though that belief is a grace. But what if we try to look at it from another angle? There are several points describing belief as a dangerous moral value. The first is that belief is evil when it is backed by insufficient evidence; and wrong belief can lead to destruction, death, catastrophe. The second is belief is sinful when it is blind and staunch; because it gives no way to doubting which is a real driving force of our civilization. The third says that belief influences not only a particular person who actually believes, but many other people as well. The forth says that even if not realized in deeds, belief is still significant, because it influences person’s mind and outlook. And the last one suggests thatbelief deters us from being fair, for “no man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness a if he were really in doubt and unbiased. Blind belief is as dead as its opposite – complete absence of belief, absolute doubting. We cannot any longer believe in the same way as our ancestors did. While for them reason was essential for mathematics politics or science, it could not give humans access to the divine.