To build a bridge requires faith in structural mechanics, in the designer, his materials, etc; a business requires faith in the economy. Creativity needs belief in ourselves: who would start anything without believing they could see it through? Success does not come to those who quit easily, which explains the few successes and many failures, and why the most intrusively all-pervasive figures in the modern world are often woefully short on talent, and long on self-belief.
Our private beliefs inform everything we do, whether we realise it or not. While mechanical skill enables us to work with physical elements, a radically different kind of faith leads one person to use it for constructing a nuclear bomb, to roast alive millions of innocent men, women and children, and another to develop medical research benefitting an equally large number, and still another to build a temple of worship or a statue of the Buddha.
Only when a discovery is proven by reason or experimentation can people believe in it. Others can then stand on the new platform and find further hypotheses to be tested in the same way. If we set aside new understandings of material properties, engineering and so on, as impartial and unarguable elements, it can easily be seen that the 20th and 21st centuries are primarily based on a relatively small number of beliefs:
- that scientific adances benefit most aspects of life (which is obviously true) and will one day explain the fundamental workings of the Universe, supplanting need for religion
- that money is valued over all else, even the health and survival of children, especially in third world countries, easy prey for ghoulish companies such as Nestles, Marlboro, Union Carbide, etc
- that, on an international level, territory and property can be acquired or kept safe by the use or threat of force, and constant danger exists from other countries bent on imposing the same demands
- that the human brain can withstand constant pressure (physical or emotional); that it can survive perfectly well without religious principles and is impervious to damage from hectic lifestyles, and may even be of no account when we design our ways of lives
- in the sovereignty of nations, value of patriotism, and division of humanity into separate components on all levels: individual, corporate, national, and religious, each of which has the right, if able, to gain an advantage over others by exploitation, marketing, talent, ambition, or force, without deference to any higher moral principles
- that accumulation of wealth or advantage can proceed without limit, with the final arbiter of war deciding the outcome, and that the winners are entitled to exercise their advantage to an unlimited degree, with perhaps a moderating effect of guidelines such as the Geneva Convention, if these are not totally ignored, as is usually the case.
These seem to be the fundamental beliefs on which our society is built, but how much of it is a sensible use of resources, standing up to experience or common sense, how much is sanctioned by Nature, and how much only a construct of distorted brains to satisfy a mania for wealth or power?
These pages try to show the underlying natural trends behind the major faiths and the religious impulse, the benefits of updating these systems to catch up with the huge advances made by the intellect, and the dangers of losing sight altogether of what purpose Nature might have had in instilling this mysterious impulse deep within the heart of mankind.
