Why I am a believer

Have you ever asked yourself why you believe what you believe?  You have probably asked yourself what it is that you believe on many occasions but have you asked yourself why?

Even if you have thought about it for some things I'd wager that most of you haven't given it more than a passing thought, even for the big issues such as god, religion and morality.

There will be some of you who might respond "I believe because it is the truth", but that answer is just a way of avoiding the question.  First consider that to believe something is to think that it is true. Second consider that when you say something IS the truth, you are either saying
a. "that on all the evidence presented to me so far I think that this is true."
or b. "that I don't care about evidence, I just choose to think that this is true."
So the statement "I believe because it is the truth" is equivalent to "I think this is true because I think this is true".  Not exactly a rigorous argument.

For those of you that have undertaken research yourself, or those of you have looked inward like a Buddhist monk spending years contemplating the nature of reality, your belief in any particular truth potentially only lasts as long as the next discovery or revelation.  Even the briefest look at the past will show you how ALL belief systems have evolved over time.
 
Scientific minded people often consider themselves to be beyond reproach in this area, and will come out with statements like "My beliefs are based on the evidence of years scientific experimentation", but I doubt there is a scientist alive who can claim to have based all their important beliefs on experimentation that they have done, or even on having a good understanding of all relevant areas pertaining to that belief.

So why do you believe what you believe?  Simply put you believe most things because someone told you it was true and you chose to believe.  It isn't hard to see evidence of this everywhere you look.  Is it just a co-incidence that the vast majority of children share the same broad religious beliefs of their parents? Of course as children we choose to believe what our seemingly all knowing parents tell us.  Apparently there is also evidence that we humans are programmed to copy those around, both in terms of how to do things but also in terms of belief.  It provides a survival advantage in a complex social groupings.

Of course we are not pre-destined to continue believing tomorrow everything we believed yesterday, but for most of us once a belief is held it takes something significant to change that belief.  The belief becomes part of us, part of our view of ourselves, and we naturally defend any attack on ourselves.

My father was an atheist, and so it was only natural that I grew up an atheist.   Recently I discovered that my father was in fact not an atheist, he was agnostic, i.e. He thought that god might or might not exist.  Discovering this did not change my belief, even though I accept that the reason for me believing what I do was a child's misunderstanding.

And my point?

Maybe that whenever we feel superior because of our "rightness" or angry at others "wrongness" consider that your truth is not a rock but insubstantial sands.  It is unlikely that it is an absolute truth and you probably owe it mostly to the chance circumstances of your birth, or as a by product of choosing to belong to a particular community.