We are shaped by our experiences more than most of us like to think.
And I grew up religious.
For all of my formative years, and quite a way into adulthood, religion was the dominant force in my life.
So a very big part of how I look at the world has been formed by that. I see religion everywhere. It’s all religion. Especially the parts full of people who would look at me strangely for insisting on this, because religion is alien to them and they don’t understand it at all.
And religion really isn’t understood much, these days.
For a start, for a lot of people, whether they actually believe any of what they profess, let alone all of it, is beside the point. They’ll say they do, of course. They mostly think they do. But this is because they rarely think about whether they believe it.
Humans are strange like that. When we know we think something, we don’t have to think it. We skip that part, and move on to talking and behaving as if we do.
Religious movements know this, and have always been extremely good at capitalising on it. If you structure people’s lives for them, and provide a lot of compulsory forms for everything – behaviours for times and events, answers for questions, responses of all sorts that are approved – you can largely ignore the belief side of things. Which is convenient, because belief is harder to come by for most people. Every religion is based on things that outsiders find unbelievable; it’s kind of the point.
So for most religious people, not all, identity is far more powerful than belief, and follows it.
They won’t say so, but they live the way they do because this is who they are, and the beliefs follow that. You have to believe these things to be the people you consider yourselves. So you have to say you believe things, and will probably even say so to yourself.
There will be true believers, those who have had deep experiences within themselves and know things, believe them deeply. Of course. It’s just that in any mass movement, they are far outnumbered by the people who never ask themselves too much about any of it.
So that’s how belief systems work.
Notice I’m now talking about belief systems, not religion. I consider them basically interchangeable.
And that explains why I see religion everywhere.
For a lot of recorded human history, religion mostly WAS the belief system people lived within. More recently the Enlightenment started to do away with the need for what we think of as religion, but replaced it with belief systems of its own – the idea of human progress, and the supremacy of science as a way of looking at the world, using it and understanding it. By now, most of us think that’s a pretty solid way to think … but we haven’t thought it through from scratch, most of us, we accept it because it makes sense and everybody else does.
Those who do think deeply mostly do conclude most of the Enlightenment thinking is correct-ish, which is not something most would say of any world religion if required to examine it from known facts upwards. But that’s not the point, here, which is that most of us, most of the time, behave exactly as if it’s a dominant religion – just the way things work, with people who know more than us about the detail, which we take on trust, and accept the results.
… except that there are things that we don’t agree about, and many say don’t work, in the modern world, too. They are also belief systems.
And they really are systems.
This is why we can so often tell what someone’s opinion will be on something just because we know an entirely unrelated opinion.
“Someone like you,” we are told all our lives, “believes things like this.”
And “if you think that, then you must also think this.”
If you are compassionate, you will surely believe in these things which all compassionate people truly know are true and important.
If you are lover of freedom, then definitely you will accept that these things are essential.
As sociable humans, we find all this very hard to resist, especially when we’re not consciously aware it’s going on.
And that’s why it’s rarely worth trying to change someone’s mind.
When we see someone with a belief that doesn’t make sense, it seems obvious that we could talk them out of it. Simply present them with the facts that show their belief to be false, and they surely can’t keep believing it?
But the fact that most people, most of the time, treat their beliefs as a matter of identity rather than fact – like a religion – explains why our instinct is wrong. Irrationally, when we hear something that conflicts with what we believe, most of us, even when it isn’t something we’ve put mental effort into arriving at, it feels like someone is questioning who we are.
Religion, over the course of history, has been very good at getting people to believe (or claim to believe, even under intense pressure) things that non-believers find ridiculous. There’s not much less easy to accept than religious “truths” you don’t share. But those who do share them will kill for those beliefs, even though they’re factually indefensible.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that we behave the same way over other kinds of belief. Even where religion has ebbed away, the patterns of thought remain very deeply embedded and structure how we behave in things that aren’t religious.
The world, and the internet, is full of religious wars, and many of them have no Gods at the centre at all.
So what do we do?
Personally I find that knowing this helps. Other people think I’m completely wrong, but for me, it means I can be more tolerant than I would otherwise be.
I don’t expect to change people’s minds, so I’m not disappointed so often.
It means I can discuss things with people, more interested in what they believe and why they believe it than offended at how wrong they are, which enriches me. I am happy to argue my own case strongly when someone is OK with disagreement, because that’s the best test of any belief, and I don’t suppose my own are any less irrational than others’ are.
And I suspect that this is actually how we move forward more reliably, anyway. Because the first step to changing anyone’s belief is decoupling it from their identity, and making it OK for them to be the person they are and believe what they want. Then they can look at the belief for themselves and decide if it suits them.
As long as we insist everybody must be rational and debate on the facts …
… well, we’re hanging on to a basically religious belief that that works, in the face of the facts. It doesn’t.