Either Or Beliefs

Either my life is turning into complete shit, or everything is as it should be.
Or
Life is as I believe it to be, and I'm perilously close to believing it to be really shitty?

Constructing a belief system is a major pain in the ass these days. Mainly because there are so many to choose from.
Would you like to believe the powers that be are a charade to mask the banker puppeteers?
Would you like to believe that those powers that be are of descendant royal lineage of reptilian inbreeding?
Would you like to believe that the universe is ultimately a loving place, where we agree to be separated from that love to experience the joy of discovering and remembering that truth?

Then, once you decide what you want to believe, you have to toss it out there for peer review to see if there is actual evidence contradicting what you want to believe. When you find something that starts to hold up to this sort of peer-review, you begin to notice how little people notice the choice of belief they have.

Take my model of faith and beliefs understanding. No one seems to have anything to attack it with other than their personal definitions of the terms. No one is willing to contradict the psychological mechanics of it, though.

Idea + Faith = Belief. You can nest beliefs.

If you have the belief that you exercise no measure of faith, you can find the beliefs requiring faith that support that claim. You can always trace beliefs back to faith. Anything you believe that does not come directly from first hand experience is something you've taken on faith. You had to apply faith to each and every one of those ideas in order to believe them.

You probably take it on faith that cyanide is poisonous. You may add faith to the idea that there has been scientific tests proving cyanide poisonous, and make it a belief. You can add faith to the idea that 'they use it as poison in movies and someone would call them on it if it wasn't poison' and use that to believe cyanide is poisonous.

Faith is everywhere. There's just a lot of competing notion of what qualifies an idea as worthy of the application of faith. Some, for example, believe that the only ideas worth applying faith to are the ideas that have survived the scientific method. Once they believe a thing to be true, they reclassify it as a fact instead of a belief.

What are you Selling?

That's putting it a language everyone reading this should be able to understand. I think we owe it to each other to understand what it is we're selling, so we can have honest dealings with one another.

I'm selling the perspective that however well what we've been doing up until now has worked - how well it has gotten us this far - we need to move on to something new. I'm selling the theory of evolution, but only if applied to 'all the things'. All the things evolve, including society.

I'm offering a healthy dose of - A species is an organism. Humanity is an organism, a giant sprawling thing consisting of 7 billion or so individual cells. I'm selling you the perspective that the health of the whole is intimately connected with the health of each and every individual.

Slide on these magic goggles and see that the fact that your neighbor is an obese, ignorant man, with a nasty habit of beating his wife is indicative of a systematic illness within our organism. Consider also that a malleable cell, such as a stem cell, is chiefly the product of his environment. While all of the individual cells have built in self-regulation, that they fail to thrive in an environment is the responsibility of their society. The society entity is chief architect of the environment in which a new citizen-cell develops.

String of Words

There is, in the realm of possibility, a string of words that I could type here that would change my life forever. I'm not sure of the length of that variable string of words, or what subject matter its words would dance around. Somewhere though, there's a string of words that could change it all.

This fabled String of Words would have the 'just right' amount of emotional appeal to resonate with 'just the right person', prompting them to share it within their network. In this manner, the String of Words would weave its way through human social networks to just the right person. The String of Words would create a bridge between my life and the life of just the right person, for our mutual benefit.

Somewhere in the realm of possibility, that string of words exists. For those that dream of making their way through life by stringing words together, that string of words is the Holy Grail, Fountain of Youth, and Lost City of Gold.