Belief
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Belief is an assertion of and commitment to the quality of absolute truth represented by some notion. Of course, there are very few things that can be said to actually be 'absolutely true', being that truth and falsehood are relative constructs useful only as measurements of the degree to which things are verifiable, or of the meaning of a subjective model. All belief, therefore, is more or less meaningful, but neither true nor false, except subjectively.
It may be better to stay away from believing things altogether; one may find other methods of determining whether a given idea is meaningful. Perhaps thinking might help. The odd open discussion can't hurt either. These kinds of notions unfortunately don't tend to appeal to the vast majority of people, who are quite comfortable believing all sorts of things. Most people are quite comfortable with the notion that they have figured something out with some degree of certainty. Such people generally wind up weighing every new idea they encounter against their own personal belief system, and such is the cause of much conflict, both physical and cognitive.
One thing humans are very bad at doing is admitting that they don't know much.