Faith and Belief

by Glen A. Vickers

Description From the beginning of our species we have relied on faith and beliefs to survive. Both faith and belief are behaviors we have carried forward out of the jungle and into the modern age. Everyone is born with a drive to believe in the supernatural. Everyone is born with a deep sense of curiosity and wonder. But when we developed the ability to predict outcomes and foresee our own death we gave birth to religion. With religion we created faith claims and belief structures. Faith was, and is, our greatest burden we carry forward that hinders our abilities and deadens our minds. When faith is abused we can sometimes gain from the experience. We can have faith in someone telling us that something is dangerous without ever knowing if it is true or not. We could test the faith claim to confirm it. But it is better to have faith that something is dangerous than find out for yourself and die. With this cognitive error we develop our trust in things through faith without ever determining if it is true or not. We believe a claim because we were told. In the modern day faith has converted from a survival instinct to claims of facts and reality. When we became an inquisitive species that knew and retained that we will die we were instantly set with a deep seeded fear. The fear that all animals share is the fear of death. The only problem with our fear of death is we knew it was coming and there was nothing we could do about it. We needed an answer to that fear. We needed something that would ease our mental suffering. The answer came in the form of the first religion. My book explores the use of faith, how one connects faith to reality, and the failures of faith in every capacity. I focused on collecting our vast amount of knowledge in a variety of subjects to connect them in a cohesive manner where the layman could connect and view the arguing points of theists of every creed. I focused on connecting our current knowledge of the world where faith claims have failed in nearly every discourse. From geology to psychology, the modern religions have failed in answering reality in every capacity. However, the followers of the faith have done both incredibly good works and incredibly horrible ones. To their merit, I include examples of both the positive and negative side. Yet that is the last bastion of hope for religion. With religion dying across the globe we are left with another unyielding question, what will come next? What could replace religion? To find out we should look at those who turned to atheism as well as those that never grew up in any religion. Science cannot provide us with an answer to this question. The problem is, there are so many parts to a religion it is difficult to narrow down what could possibly give us an alternative. However, we do have options and those options might be in the most unlikely of places. With the theme of faith and belief; I return to the nature of faith and the uses of belief in our historical and modern sociology. We have developed much as a race yet faith and belief remain a divisive point of our humanity. By understanding how faith works in the modern view coupled by how beliefs work with our psychology we can unravel the stranglehold our ancient tool of survival has inflicted us with. Faith claims, and the beliefs associated with them, need to be understood so that we can progress past their failures and limitations.