On Belief
Yesterday, a friend of mine said "I don't know if I believe in a higher power." A seemingly innocuous phrase about philosophy but anytime I hear it (or something like it) it makes me cringe.
To explain why I need to go over a few things. First, philosophical beliefs aren't just strong opinions, they are concepts and ideas which define how you think. A suicide bomber doesn't blow himself up just because he strongly disagrees with you; it's because his whole method of thought has been bastardized by a belief that the ability to see simple faults in his logic is gone.
A belief is something that you have to actively have. By this, I mean it isn't something that you casually trip into. It means you think you've looked into a subject enough to have a good comprehension of the issues involved and that what you believe is the only reasonable conclusion one can make. This also means that you don't have to have a belief just because you are knowledgeable about a subject.
The conclusion I'm heading towards is the thing that causes my cringe-itude: if you don't know enough about the subject to say what you believe in, you don't believe in it.
The person quoted at the beginning of this does not believe in a higher power because he, admittedly, doesn't know what a higher power is. He may very well believe in something larger than us or something along those lines but since he can't define the subject ("Higher power" in this case), he simply can't believe in it.
The reason why this is such a touchy subject with me is that it points out one of the, in my opinion, greatest flaws of our culture: the inability to admit Finity. To put it another way, rarely can one openly admit that they are ignorant of a subject.
The ability to say "I don't know" is an important step to being a thinking person; a person whose opinion is worth something.
Far too many people will spout simplistic one-liners about topics when they have no understanding before even considering admitting ignorance. When faced down by someone with an understanding, they'll continue, wasting everyone else's time and they may just make other people stupider in the process.
So, when someone says "I don't know if I believe in ", what they really mean to say is that they don't know enough about the subject to state a belief but they also don't want to admit they don't know what they're talking about.