Belief

Belief. Belief comes primarily from two sources
1. Conditioning
2. Experience

1. Conditioning of belief. This comes from parents, siblings, family, friends, TV, video games, books, school, the government,religion etc.
2. Experiences creating beliefs come from everything one experiences from conception until passing on.

Throughout ones life this mixture of conditioning and experience takes place. in a sense conditioning is more about group hypnosis than anything else. As a child one doesn't have too much control over this kind of group hypnosis experiment constantly going on. However, as a fully functioning adult one can exert control of ones own life if one wants to enough.

For those of you who thought I was just going to talk about belief in regard to religion I might disappoint you because I see all beliefs from believing we are living on planet earth to calling the star in the sky the sun or the planet that circles earth the moon as a part of conditioning and belief as much as something called God or something called religion or spirituality or even humanism. All these things are caused to "stick" in our minds through a combination of conditioning and life experience.

3. Everyone believes in a fairy tale. This is something that I recently have found words for. In my own case at about age 21 I took stock of myself and realized that I only believed in God about 85% to 95% in that range. Then I asked myself would I choose to live if there was no God. My answer was "NO!" This then was my answer. Since I realized I would quickly commit suicide if there was no God or meaning to life then if I wanted to live I needed to pretend there was a God with the other 5% to 15% of my beliefs in order to stay alive.

I think most logical rational people at some point have to face this point too. I've met people who when they confront this some people's fairy tale unfortunately is alcohol or drugs. Luckily, mine isn't that. When I was young my fairy tale was girlfriends, which I had a a lot of, especially between ages 15 and 25 before I got married and had my first child, a son.

However, some people's fairy tale in the form of religion is so fragile that they stay on the edge of suicide all the time like the suicide bombers of radical Islam. Understanding why people choose to kill themselves for a belief and that this style is only cultural will help the world deal with suicide bombers in the long run.

Western people keep their religions more personal. For example, when I was dealing with the identity crisis of youth, it was all about me and God, that's it. However, someone in radical islam might say to themselves, "If everyone doesn't believe the way I do they should die." Now this way of thinking to a Christian Western mind is completely insane. This is the real problem of belief now in the world.

The people I meet who tend to be the most unbalanced and strange have the most conditioning and the least experience. I consider people who only have conditioning as dangerous potentially both mentally and physically. These would be people who have been trained to be criminals, religious crazies, and just people who had parents or teachers that were nuts.

The most balanced people I find have had time to have their own experiences and learned to value personal experiences over many types of conditioning. These people over the years have been the most likely to become my friends. For without enough real life experience people tend to walk around sort of like biological robots bumping into things. Because in the end conditioning is not enough.