Beliefs vs. Facts, Autobiographical Anecdotes, And The Reasons It’s Important To Question Beliefs

This article is going to be largely personal and somewhat autobiographical, but with general lessons that can be applicable to most people.

So, before we get started, let’s clear up a couple of definitions, since this will be important in what follows.

Firstly, what is a belief?

A belief is something that somebody thinks is true and/or factual, but for which no evidence exists.

If evidence existed, it would no longer be a belief, it would be a fact.

So what is a fact?

A fact is something that has actually happened, or that is empirically true and can be supported by evidence.

The key difference is that, for the most part, facts are objective, while beliefs are subjective.

I’m going to cover various types of belief, starting with religion because that is one of the most prevalent beliefs that humans have, as well as fate, ghosts, mysticism, superstitions, and wishful thinking.

Religion

My mother was raised as a Roman Catholic, as was all of her family, although she was certainly not a practising one. For example, throughout my childhood, I never remember he attending mass or going to confession. The only time she really ever mentioned it was, during her final years, when she asked my father to make sure the last rites were said before she died.

On the other hand, my father didn’t seem to know what he was, although he often claimed to be some form of Scottish presbyterian, but again, his only relationship to faith was via freemasonry, who refer to the Great Architect of the Universe.

(Because my mother married outside her faith, that technically makes me illegitimate in the eyes of the Catholic church, for whatever that’s worth.)

As a child, then, I was not overly exposed to religion in any form, although the schools I attended were, strictly speaking, Church of England (sometimes known as Anglican).

Here’s the thing, though – I was entirely neutral regarding all those stories of God and Jesus, and the Bible in general. I didn’t buy into any of it for one minute, but at the same time, I didn’t refute them either. I suppose my young brain didn’t yet possess the tools to process it all.

By the time I was in my early teens, I’d come to realize:

1. I didn’t feel a need for a belief in God. I thought I should be responsible for my own life and decisions, and didn’t like the idea of some omnipotent being watching over me 24 hours a day.
2. There was no evidence for the existence of any supreme being.

I guess, technically, I’d consciously become an atheist – i.e. I did not accept the claims that God (or any gods) existed because there was no evidence to substantiate those claims – rather than being a de facto atheist, as we all are when we are born.

However, I kept this to myself, not out of fear, but because the subject didn’t arise.

A few years after I left school, shortly after my maternal grandfather died, my aunt (also technically a Catholic) and I were named executors of his will.

At the solicitor’s office, we both had to swear that we would do our duties, as executors, to the best of our ability (or some such promise – the details are fuzzy after 40 years).

And for reasons I did not, and still do not, understand, I chose that moment to reveal my atheism, by saying I couldn’t swear on the Bible because I didn’t believe in God.

I could tell by the expression on her face that it shocked the hell (pun intended) out of my aunt, although she never raised the subject.

And since then, I have been very open about my atheism.

So what does this all mean, and what can you learn from it all?

Many of the beliefs we grow up with, religion especially, are inherited from our parents – who learned them from their parents, and so on, back through generations.

It is estimated there are, or have been, thousands of religions (and that doesn’t even include the thousands of variations of Christianity with their different interpretations of their Bible).

And yet most people follow the same religion as their parents do.

You can see why this is the case, of course, given that your parents are the most influential people in your early life, but what this means is that most people don’t choose their religion – it’s chosen for them.

Do you know of anybody who has looked at all of the different religions and then come to a reasoned decision that a certain one is right for them?

I certainly don’t.

And by the time most children are in their teens, they begin to realize that their parents are not right about everything.

Children typically come to know that stories about Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are just that – stories – before they reach the age of ten.

But why is it that most people never question religion?

Some people say that the Bible is evidence for God, but the Bible is the claim, and therefore cannot also be used as the evidence.

So, let’s say that you actually read the Bible (something that many Christians never actually do), and you come across something that seems incredible, such as the Flood.

At face value, the entire earth being covered by water, does seem hard to believe.

You therefore have three choices:

1. You can assume it’s just a metaphor for something – a cautionary tale, if you like. This would be akin to reading Aesop’s Fables – you know they are just stories, which are not meant to be taken literally, but they are stories with a message or moral.
2. You can take it at face value and assume the story is actually true. Without evidence, this is, then, nothing more than a belief.
3. You can try to find evidence that this Flood actually happened.

And when you start looking into it, you’ll find that many different branches of science (e.g., anthropology, archaeology, dendrochronology, geology, meteorology, paleontology, zoology, and even mythology) say that the Flood did not, and could not, happen (as you can see in these videos).

You have now found evidence that contradicts the Flood story, and with that, the knowledge that this particular part of the Bible, at least, is incorrect.

Religion is one of the most common and deep-seated beliefs that humans have, and I can see that many find comfort in the (unproven) promises of an eternal afterlife spent with those you have loved, but that does not mean you should not question your religion’s beliefs.

For some people, their religion affects their entire lives (e.g., what they can do, where they can go, who they can date or marry, what is done to their bodies), and I would not want to allow anything or anyone that much power and control over my life without first confirming for myself that it was all true and real.

Fate / Karma

Many people of faith believe that their god has a plan for them, which effectively means that their lives are already mapped out, which is one way of looking at fate.

Others (i.e., those who are not religious) sometimes have a similar belief that everything happens for a reason (e.g., you were meant to meet a certain person), or that karma is real (i.e., you reap what you sow).

And for a short while, during my 40s, I too fell for it.

I was near the end of a 24-year marriage that had turned very sour, I had been severely depressed for several years, and then I met a lady online, via a business / ecommerce site.

We quickly became business partners, then friends, then lovers (or so I thought), and she brought up the idea that we were spiritual mates, and that maybe we had been together in an earlier life.

It sort of felt that way to me, too, but a part of me also rejected it.

I accept that humans appear to have an innate need to find meaning in life, to have some purpose, to have explanations for things we don’t understand, and I realize that the thought you may live on in some form after your death is appealing and comforting – but I didn’t buy it.

I was also aware of a few reincarnation stories where people appeared to have details they could only have known by being present somewhere in the past, but these stories are somewhat rare.

I think what brought me back to reality was:

1. Coincidences do happen.
2. There is no substantial evidence of past lives or reincarnation (and, consequently, karma).
3. There is no substantial evidence that any deity or “the universe” has any plans for anybody. Humans like to anthropomorphize and project, saying things like “Nature wants to…”, but I hold the view that nature doesn’t “want” anything – i.e., there is no conscious intent.

Ghosts / Demons

This is something that I don’t ever remember believing in myself, but I have met plenty of people (both religious and non-religious) who do.

My main problem with the concept of ghosts is this: if the body is a container for the spirit or soul, call it whatever you want, then when the body is gone, what remains to keep those elements of your soul in one place, where they are still able to function as an integrated whole?

As far as I am concerned, I’m with the comedian Louis C.K., who said, “Lot’s of things happen after you die – they just don’t involve you.” (Well, not after your funeral.)

But essentially, once again, there is no evidence that anything approaching a soul exists, and that means that ghosts, etc., cannot exist either.

Mysticism

In spite of my already personally accepted atheism, during my mid-teens, I became interested in what would fall under the general heading of mysticism.

For example, I read a few works by T Lobsang Rampa, including books on astral projection, as well as other books on astrology, numerology, palm reading, and even magic (both black and white).

This phase didn’t last long – maybe a couple of years, at most – perhaps because I’d already rejected claims of gods and the supernatural.

While the books I read were engaging, the questions still remained – where is the real evidence? For example, had any of this stuff been studied objectively?

And so I soon dismissed most of these topics as being unsupportable, with the realization that much of it was nothing more than wishful thinking.

Superstitions

I suspect most of us grew up with a few of these (e.g., don’t walk under ladders, don’t let a black cat cross your path, don’t walk on the cracks between paving stones, and the power of the number 13), and while I remember being told about the bogeyman and other stories, I cannot remember any that I particularly believed in.

Maybe my parents let me off by not telling me too many of these superstitions, or maybe it was my noticing that they didn’t seem to be bothered by any of them, but either way, I think I realized early on in life that a lot of these superstitions were just stories, at least some of which were designed to scare children into behaving.

Wishful Thinking

I touched on this earlier, in the Mysticism section, but it goes deeper than that.

During my adult years, I am embarrassed to admit that, for a short while, I believed a few claims that people had found gambling systems (e.g., roulette, horse racing) that worked.

To be fair, this was largely encouraged by my wife, but I already knew (largely through an interest in what I call “leisure mathematics”, where I had a good working knowledge of chance and probability) that such systems could not exist.

I’m still not sure why I fell for these. I think it was partly because my wife was enthusiastic about these systems and was desperate to find a way to make easy money, and she pulled me along with her, which is basically where the wishful thinking came it, but I know I cannot push all of the blame onto her.

And after a few months of having more downs than ups, and losing money (surprise, surprise), I managed to convince her that these systems could not possibly work in the long run – because the facts (e.g., probability theory) said otherwise.

Conclusion

Why does any of this matter?

Why shouldn’t people be free to believe whatever they want?

Well, there are a few points to note here:

1. People should be free to believe whatever they want – provided that they don’t try to enforce those beliefs on others and provided that they don’t act on those beliefs to the detriment of others.
2. Beliefs are subjective, not objective. If there were evidence to support a belief, it would become a fact, and therefore not something you would need faith to believe in any longer.
3. You are, in most cases, going to make better decisions in life if you base those decisions on facts (i.e., things demonstrably and objectively true) than on beliefs, for which no evidence exists.
4. Just because a large number of people believe a certain thing does not necessarily make it true.
5. Many decisions we make are personal to us and involve both facts and feelings. What we decide might be right for us might not be right for somebody else. But if you ignore the facts and choose to make those decisions based on things for which no evidence exists, then you may well be making a poor choice.
6. As successful marketers will tell you, humans do make many of their decisions, even important ones, based on emotions, and it seems unlikely this will change anytime soon. We may like to pretend we are rational creatures, but this is often simply wishful thinking at work again. Again, though, this is no reason to discount facts and prefer beliefs instead.
7. Some people say they rely on hunches and gut instincts, but these are, for the most part, fancy words for beliefs or guesses. Educated guesses, maybe, but still guesses.
8. If you don’t question the beliefs that were instilled in you as a child, you may be missing out on a lot of opportunities. Some of these beliefs can be extremely limiting, but when you question them, you may discover there is no truth to them at all. For example, a strict religious upbringing can cause hadephobia (yes, this is a real thing, which means an irrational fear of Hell), causing serious mental problems later in life. Or maybe as a child, you dropped something once or twice (as children often do) and were told you were clumsy, and this idea stuck with you, unnecessarily preventing you from following a career path that might require manual dexterity.
9. Learning to question your beliefs teaches you valuable critical thinking skills that will serve you for the rest of your life. Maybe these skills will prevent you from being taken in by a con man or help you spot a bad business deal.
10. Whatever your beliefs may be, you should be open to the possibility that those beliefs are wrong, because you may be spending time, energy, and money on the wrong thing. For example, you may be worshipping the wrong god (assuming that any exist), or you may be lining the pockets of those who falsely claim to have psychic powers.
11. And finally, at worst, making decisions based on beliefs rather than facts can be dangerous or even fatal. To see that this happens, you only have to look at the all-too-common cases where children died because their parents incorrectly believed prayer, not medical intervention, would save their lives.

Despite all I’ve said in this article, I think it’s also important to maintain an open mind – and I am still open to the possibility that gods and ghosts and the suchlike exist, but, and it’s a big but, I will need a fair amount of evidence before I’ll believe in them. And as I said, once there is evidence, these beliefs would become facts anyway.

As Carl Sagan was wont to say, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

People may care about what you believe (and peer pressure is a strong influencer) – but the truth doesn’t. The truth is neutral, and, therefore, a thing of beauty.

And finally, I do appreciate the irony inherent in this article being my beliefs about beliefs. 🙂

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. 10 Questions To Help You Identify Your Limiting Beliefs