Gara’s Weblog

“A Fang friend of mine once insisted that he had seen a gifted shaman perform an extraordinary feat. The old man had stuck a finger in the ground in his village and had made it re-emerge in another village several miles away, by just telling his finger to get there! When challenged by derisive sceptics in the village (“How can you claim you saw it if it all happened in two different places?”), the narrator conceded that he had witnessed only the first part of this dramatic event; but the re-emergence of the finger had been reported by very reliable sources.

[...]

Psychologist Nichols Humphrey has documented this dogged pursuit of the paranormal and the miraculous. Heroically stubborn reasearchers explore all the possible evidence, exchange masses of information on documented cases, design even more clever techniques to discover supernatural causation. The sad fact that experiments never demonstrate the intended effects -or do so only when they are not properly controlled- does not in any way dash their hopes. They lose every battle but expect to win the war. The main reason for this unbridled optimism is that there is a strong motivation here, that people really want such claims to be true”.

(Religion explained, Pascal Boyer).

OK, so I’m clearly obsessed with this question of belief, and reading this book, among others, I hope will help me reach to the core of the origin for such inclinations. It is clear that people are fond of beliefs and too often resort to them to explain all sorts of scientifically provable facts. But generally they will not turn to science, because tales are much more appealing to our minds, and certainly less brainy and more comforting in many ways. There are countless ways to illustrate this fact- a very simple one is to realise that being an atheist makes dealing with death a lot more difficult: if your loved ones die, you are convinced that that’s it and you will never see them ever again. If you are faced with a cancer, it is surely a lot harder to struggle with the fear of dying when your expectations of another life are nonexistent.

At a lower scale, esoteric beliefs of every imaginable sort seem to be spreading like the ultimate 21st Century plague. It goes against centuries of scientific research, rationality, and of course against the French Enlightenment and all the rest of currents of thought which have fought the war against superstition, trying to advocate that reason should be the primary source for authority.

But they lost. All around me I keep hearing, more and more often, esoteric explanations for purely natural facts of life: deaths, pregnancies, births, work, love- our main sources of happiness and unhappiness are now consigned to the realm of fairytales and darkness. This -I am more convinced about it every day- will not cease to spread and will undoubtedly create a civilisation in which science will be finally pushed into the background.

The reasons for belief are many; the scary fact is its blind acceptance as a given fact, as an undeniable fact of life. But, apart from that, the whole matter is fascinating from a cultural, but also from a biological, point of view. I personally tend to explain most things as part of a cultural heritage, and I still strongly believe that our desires, thoughts, needs and even feelings can very much be explained and have been mostly shaped by our social environment. Still, it is shocking to see siblings who have been brought up in the same household, have gone to the same schools, have pretty much been around the same people, and have complete opposite beliefs. I’m still very much in the process of looking deeply into this, but it could very well be that the chemical configuration of our brain could lead us to be prone to being religious or not. Now, that would be a disaster on the basis that almost anything could be explained or excused by resorting to that answer (as it also very much happens with cultural-based explanations), which once again would leave will power and overcoming of issues and problems alone out of the equation, common as this is.

Anyway, this interest has recently lead me to not only reading about the topic, but also to asking around, and I have unsurprisingly found that most people simply take their beliefs for granted, without worrying too much about them or giving them too much thought (and this is obviously reinforced by a society which more and more tends to find questions about any kind of belief -be it political, religious, or whatever- far too challenging and/or intrusive); others have admitted that they have chosen to live with them because they make their lives more bearable; the least have stopped to give themselves some time to really think about it. But the funny thing is, none of the people who had esoteric beliefs had ever chosen to have their thoughts questioned by reading about, say, physics, or anything that could possibly challenge their ideas. Which, again, shows us how we all, in many ways (and some more than others), just choose to read about whatever we want to have reinforced, rather than trying to understand the other side: we are leftists and we buy The Guardian, we are tories and we buy the Daily Telegraph; we are atheists and we read Richard Dawkins, we believe in the power of crystals and we read The complete guide to crystal healing (I just made this one up on the spot, but I’m sure it must exist).

And I often think we should ideally do both, but there’s so little time and so many interesting things to read, and quite frankly I don’t like to waste my time on some crap… http://kristenbelieves.wordpress.com/