In the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall, and probably in the novel, Sir Thomas More says something like, I can't disbelieve what I believe. Likewise, one can't believe what one disbelieves. Well, not without some serious evidence. Or the assurance of those one trusts. Or majority opinion.
So, this thing about the millions of microbes living on or in me. I can't check that out for myself. I guess I believe it, now that various sources tell the same tale. The earth's roundness, the distance to the moon, the molecular make up of water, the extinction of the dodo. These are slightly different factoids. If the earth were not round, then surely many people have been playing a massive and complicated hoax. The distance to the moon, well, we might be a little bit out, I suppose. Water? We could, perhaps, all be misinterpreting? Though it seems unlikely. As for the dodo, that would be disproven should one appear. They could, at an extreme stretch, be very wily birds.
Then, of course, there's stuff like religion, which is what set me thinking as that little graffiti cockerel was next to the back entrance of a closed-up church. It's said we can't disprove the existence of God. Nor, it seems, can we prove it. The literal facticity of the Bible appears unlikely, given fossils and carbon dating et al. Though I guess we might have all that wrong.
So what makes people believe? Upbringing, peers, and the desire, I expect, to attribute significance to human life.
I have been reading Graham Harvey's Animism. And what people believe in different places and at different times is fascinating. Though I'm not sure that it bears much resemblance to Fundamentalist Christians or Muslims. Animist belief systems seem to be about acts of diplomacy with the more-than-human world: ways in which we can all rub along together - you, me, the squirrels, oaks, crows, and dandelions. And some other agential beings who might be winds or ancestors or something akin to spirits.
The Abrahamic religions, in contrast, are about getting along with others like us - other Christians, say, who are also human.
We move from a multiverse of minds to the need for all minds to be unified and same species (if not same race, colour, gender, sexuality and so on).
Why would one want to believe a religion that separates rather than one that offers guidance for living in a multispecies, multivalent world?
Maybe there are two kinds of belief at play. Maybe for animists belief is about action: they act in ways that make sense of where they are, and belief arises, emerges, out of acts of appeasement, reciprocity, and so on. The other religions may take the Word and seek to make where they are conform to it. One grows from the earth; the other from the mind. In one, the earth shapes the mind; in the other, the mind shapes the world.
How is shaping the world working out for us?
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