As the political advertising reaches its pitch (and when doesn’t it?), people ask each other what they believe and try to persuade others to believe as they do. I cannot remember ever changing my mind in response to this advertising, but I have asked, so why DO people believe what they do? And the related questions: How do we talk to people who believe differently that we do? Can we “help” believing what we do? How and why do we change our mind?
So far as I know, no one has been able to predict anyone’s belief about anything about which people disagree: ice cream, politics, space aliens, God. People in the same peer group or who have common backgrounds will tend to agree about things, but they won’t always. There is always a margin of randomness. There must be more than logic, for even logicians disagree.
A friend has a wonderful take on this, which has led me to a clearer idea about it.
He says that he used to say to himself, “ I believe what I know to be true.” But then he realized that none of us know very much, and to limit himself to what he knew would be silly. So he reframed his thought to, “I believe what I HOPE to be true.” There are some loopholes there, but it acknowledges a deep truth: that what we WANT to believe is more important than what we DO believe. What we do believe blows with the wind. Even Leonard Cohen says, “I don’t trust inner feelings. Inner feelings come and go.” But hopes can be shaped by reason into something more permanent, something that can be a beacon to guide one’s action over the long haul.
In response I tried to come up with a similar statement of my own. The result as something more “priestly” than I might have expected, given the fact that I am no longer serving at altar, and that my calling to the priesthood was always conditioned by the needs of the local parish. What I came up with was: “I hope to believe what the Church, at its best, has always taught.” That is, I accept that the Church has it right when it teaches that a loving God made a good world that has gone wrong, but that God intervened in history to give us access to ways we can use to make it more like it was intended, until one day when it will be set right, finally and irrevocably and in unimaginable ways.
These ways are written about in the most mysterious and profound and troubling book I have ever read, and I have read many books. I do not understand much of what the Bible says, despite having read it through every year for many years and studied it with many commentaries. But I know that when I turned my attention to scripture my life improved, and so I keep my face in that direction, aided by the light of some of best minds of the Western world, thinking hard for 20 centuries. There are many questions I cannot answer, and I will not force myself to premature answers that give no comfort. But I will abide in confidence that when answers are forthcoming, they will come from that direction.
georgeslanger 