The Power of Belief

The power of deeply-held and deeply-vested belief is awesome. if a belief is bolstered with an organized system of supporting fabricated material or if a belief is important to one's feeling of security, the mind will do whatever is necessary to maintain the belief, hallucinating, if necessary. Belief can lift one to heroics or cause one to destroy oneself.

The phenomenon of distorted mental function is perhaps most clearly displayed in the personality of the 'true believer'. Belief is a large component in the mind of any individual deeply immersed in religión and is most noticeabe in the resultant irrationalities and avoidance of infirmation by these individuals. We see it in terms of the mindless and often hysterical expressions of their faith, their intolerance of other beliefs, and in their desperate struggles to maintain these beliefs in a real world which offers evidence only to the contrary.

To maintain religious faith, vast amounts of information must be avoided, misinterpreted or distorted and any argument to support the belief must be seized upon, even though the argument will have been shown to be invalid. There is no exclusive with keeping the faith. As has been covered elsewhere, this cumulative avoidance of afactual knowledge has devastating effects upon the individual and upon any culture.

The true believer characteristically will also try to impose their own irrationalities upon others. The believer lives in a world of opinion. Lacking objective referents, there is a desperate need for confirmation of their beliefs from others.

Individual delusions translate to group behavior, the institutions insuring popular indoctrination, maintaining dysfunctional síndromes. We can measure it in the political thrust of the religions 'Right', the mindlessness of religious bumper stickers, the heavy religious hand on school textbook selection committees and the mindless mobs that gather at abortion clinics.

You can see it in the laws of the land in terms of codes, statutes and reglations designed to impose a particular morality through prohibition of both behavior and commodities. You can see it in an almost universal approach to governing, that of athoritarianism, modeled on the god concept, where control is arbitrarily imposed, mindless of rationality, feasibility, or costs in terms of negative effects. Under authoritarianism, the natural autonomy of the individual is usurped and natural autonomous controls are alrgely suppressed, not allowed to develop or function.

Belief is the predomínate menas of social control and manipulation. It is also the foremost pathogen of humanity. The harmful effects of belief can be measured through comparative tests designed to measure inductive reasoning aberrations, levels of real (factual) knowledge, individual reactance to belief-threatening information and distorted perception. More palpably, it can be measured by the destructive systems and activities, shaped and maintained by governments.