Questioning Belief

Let me get straight to the question.

What is the power of a belief system? What is it capable of doing?

My answer to this question is: “Anything.”

A belief system can make you become a monk and give up violence, along with many modern-day luxuries. Or it can lead you to kill tourists in Pahalgam, attempt to crash a plane to kill Jews, or kill Dabholkar. A belief can make you feel united or divided—and, often, both at the same time. It can lead you to deprive women or people considered to be of a lower caste of their basic rights.

What is a belief system?

To answer this, we need to understand the duality of reality and fantasy.

Questioning reality is, in itself, a hard philosophical problem. If we can’t really define the term, what should we even consider real? One way to approach this might be to ask a third person to describe it, or to be that third person and describe it ourselves.

Here’s an example:

There is a beautifully sculpted, beautifully polished rock in a beautifully architected building.

This could be a real description given by a third person, but someone might come up, point a finger at you, and yell, “You can’t call the Shivling a polished rock.”

The best “third person” we have is science and mathematics. Science does not care what you believe in. It says, this is our current understanding of the universe, these are the experiments, and you can verify them for yourself. This understanding could be proven wrong by a better one in the future. If you’re the one to do that, or to advance our understanding, we will reward you.

Stories don’t care about any of this. They want you to accept everything without asking any questions.

Thinking about this, I realized that “belief” is a much broader term. Religion is not the only belief system we have. There are many other constructs in society that aren’t really real, such as money, democracy, the Constitution, political parties, human rights, and even nations. Unless a significant group of people believes in them, they have no meaning.

Belief can be defined as a story that a person or group of people thinks is reality.

What’s the difference, then?

Clearly, there has to be some difference between belief in a religion and belief in a nation. I can’t put both in the same “set” of belief systems. I just need to create “subsets” to account for the different types.

One thing that comes to mind is the “supernatural.” If a belief system mentions any godly or heavenly entity, we should put it in the first subset. But there are faiths without the supernatural.

A fair conclusion would be “questionability.” If a system allows me to challenge it and provides a way to change it, then we can put it in the second subset and call it a “societal construct”, something that helps solve the problem of crowd management while allowing for amendments.

The most important factor I can think of is “evolution.” Even if a system accepts criticism, is it really evolving? Does it allow for complete reform? Does it make changes to its beliefs? Fundamentalists never do. It took a lot of effort to abolish Sati Pratha, and you can see this across many religions, particularly Islam. Faith resists evolution.

But in the other hand, the definitions of nations, laws, and financial markets are constantly evolving as our understanding grows.

Let’s take an example: LGBTQIA+ identities were unlawful in many nations, but that’s no longer the case in many of them because constitutions allow amendments. The Gita, Ramayan, Manusmriti, and Sharia don’t.

Should I reject the Gita and Ramayan completely just because they belong to the first subset? No. I can accept them as stories and take lessons from them, and that’s what I should do with all mythological texts and religions. It’s what you do when watching movies or reading novels.

In my view, the third argument, the argument of evolution and major reforms, is the best way to formally distinguish between the two subsets of belief systems.

Why do faiths persist?

There are many reasons, some good and some ugly.

The good

There are faithful scientific minds. Is this questionable? In my opinion, yes.

Do they understand that their scientific minds can be questioned? Yes, they clearly do.

But why do they still have faith? For psychological support. The fact that we are living on a floating rock in an incomprehensibly large universe, getting hit by tons of particles daily, is a bit scary. The belief that someone is balancing it all feels reassuring.

हमको मालूम है जन्नत की हक़ीक़त लेकिन,

दिल के ख़ुश रखने को 'ग़ालिब' ये ख़याल अच्छा है

For them, faith is just a placebo.

The ugly

There are religions in which leaving the religion means death. You don’t really have a choice.

There are power structures and privileges that you get by birth, with no merit required. If you’re part of the clan, you’re powerful; otherwise, you’re considered a slave or a second-class person.

These are the reasons why the first subset persists, and will persist for a long time.

Please share your opinions here.