Believing

Believing is a concept that I have been pondering on even since my childhood and is a concept that i am having hard time explaining. I have realized that i can write this subject, which i have been thinking about writing 3-4 years ago but failed to put together, in a monologue style. Normally I am trying to write in the form of introduction, analysis and result but this subject is way too deep to divide that way. What is believing and how do you believe? Let me write my message in the beginning. We actually don’t exactly believe what we say we believe. As a matter of fact, we use the term believing in a wrong manner mostly. In the end, we are partially fooling ourselves. This is what i will try to explain.

Since i was raised in a muslim family and environment, i was seeing people believing in god. Afterwards, naturally, they have mentioned me about existence and unity of god. They said i must believe in god. That made me a bit confused. How can i believe in an entity that i can’t see, just because someone is telling me to? I mean don’t i need some data or evidence for that?

In this case, some said “believe even if you don’t understand”. I don’t judge them. Some said you will understand when you grow up. Some told me about the bad things and told me stay away from them. Some started out with claiming that a letter can’t exists without a writer. Some explained that a prophet came and told us this way. And similar to these, everyone suggested their own reasonings and proofs. This made me even more confused. Their reasons were not understandable or enough reasons for me. Of course the point of this post is not belief of god. I tried to go deeper on this.

I have questioned how people believe in what they believe. Almost everyone is choosing to make an inference based on what concrete info they have. Because no one can construct an opinion about something that they can’t see or touch or hear. There is a term called unknown. You need an unknown to start believing. But people propose their belief based on what they already know and this is where the misconception starts.

The spark that gave an actual clue to me to believe in god rather than blatantly accept, was seeing the humans’ inadequacy. It made sense for a god to set things right, where there are a lot of things that we can’t comprehend can exist. This was based on what I have seen. I will get back to god. Let’s throw a dice now.

When i throw a dice, you may believe a certain number will come up. For example 3. Why 3? You have no idea? Why not other numbers? You again have no idea. You have just believed in the number 3 at that moment. Of course you may be wrong. But if you say that you believe that the dice will come up as 4 after it landed, would it make sense? No, it would be just information.

Now let’s try to look at the daily life. This is where people’s misconception starts. We humans usually infer things. These inferences are usually based on statistics. We favor for one possibility over others and choose it. We call this a belief but it is wrong. For example we believe an apple would fall if I drop it right? Because the apple will fall even if it is dropped for a million times. But suppose it has hanged in the air for once. Then you would probably doubt a little but still think that the apple will still fall in the next trial. But people say “I believe that it will fall”. This is not the correct expression.

Belief is not the end, it is rather the start. You don’t start believing after you know certain things. You would rather form your behaviour after you start believing something. This is why you usually mean your thoughts when you are talking about your beliefs. But then you become overly attached to things that you call “your beliefs” or on the contrary, you get manipulated easily. People should be able to avoid biased opinions or choosing sides and stay in the middle when inferring something or constructing an opinion. If you neglect this, millions of people, who based their ridiculous beliefs on ridiculous reasons, who hold on to them firmly, emerge.

In essence, believing must be hard. We humans are usually need proofs to believe in things. For example, if one of your close friends says there is a fight and calls you, you might probably go there without questioning. Because your friend never lied to you or this is the first time he/she ever calls you to a fight so this must be true, right? We usually expect to see miraculous things to believe in a god. Maybe that is why there are prophets assigned in this world.

But there are also things that we believe without concrete evidence. For example, we believe that the good people would win. We may believe that money won’t bring happiness, even though we have never been rich. Or on the contrary, you may believe money will bring happiness. There are also times that we say “something tells me that…” kind of things. But when it comes to god, our inner voice may say different things :) I have talked about that kind of issue in my universe theory.

Most of our view or opinions in this world are merely our assumptions or expectations. We don’t realize that we are coming to conclusions based on very limited information. For example, how can someone defend their belief? Actually you can’t. When you ask me why i believe in god, i can tell you about my impression based on my limited information. Also a non-believer might tell you their intuition bas on their limited information. But strangely, we are arguing over beliefs. We are actually arguing over our inferences and it is futile when we have this misconception.

So, i have concluded a rather complex post. My intention is not to insult people here. But i think there is a misconception around this topic and it leads us to unproductive fights. I think i can end this post with a saying that i have found and liked very much. Life is always more than your expectations and assumptions. See you at the next post :)