Useful beliefs...true or not true?
Also: "La cuna" - No more frontiers
Almost everything you read demands to be taken as true.
Even fiction. You must suspend your disbelief as long as the story goes on. And usually we play along, taking things as true without knowing whether they are.
It’s an accepted part of being, understanding, and relating; it seems wrong somehow to not believe something, to not pick sides, to not have a stance on a said topic and say “I know this is true about [fill in the blank].”
Imagine then my pleasant surprise when I finished a book with this last line: “I hope you found this book useful, not true.”
Finally a book that encourages me to think through its contents and to challenge the arguments it makes. I smiled as I finished the short book — my agnostic mind took a deep breath and exhaled, once again glad to find its struggles are not entirely insane, invalid, or individual.
[A bit of background before we continue: Derek Sivers reached out to me three weeks ago, curious as to what my thoughts were on his newest book Useful, Not True. He was kind enough to send me an early copy, which I read a few times before deciding to write this in response. So no, it’s not going to be a book summary, a book review, or a “read this, it’s so good” post. It’s something more personal than any of the above, and may even seem self-contradictory in part. But I hope it shall be, at the least, an intriguing glimpse into how I currently understand the nature of belief. (Let me also clarify: I don’t intend to argue for certain beliefs in this essay. Examples used are just that — examples.)]
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Beliefs — those intangible thingamajigs we argue over, spend our lives figuring out, and perhaps even die for — don’t exist outside of our minds. (Hurts just a little to realize, doesn’t it?)
And more than that:
The first thought: It’s possible for something to not be true without being false.
Facts are what is. They’re either true or false, outside of (and despite) ourselves.
Beliefs are how we perceive facts. They’re either “true” or “not true,” depending.
For example: “It’s noon now” is true for me, but not for my friend in BC. So what’s true to me isn’t true to him, but it isn’t false either. Time is a fact (and even that is debatably relative) but our positions in the world differ, and so our beliefs regarding which hour it is also differs. Also note: there’s no “should be,” no “one right hour.”
Beliefs regarding what is rude, what is evil, what time it is, and what motivates you to do something all fall under this state of being “not true”. A slap on the back in greeting may be welcomed in one culture but would be seen as a hostile movement in another. Your memories are undependable, because they’re only one slice, a certain take on what has been. The future does not exist (except in the mind of God, perhaps).
Thus, discussions on beliefs often come down to a difference in perspectives, perceptions, and presuppositions.
By recognizing this, we see that beliefs cannot be validated or said to be universally true by the intensity (emotional or intellectual) and/or sincerity of the belief, as demonstrated by the believer.
Perhaps some sort of “scale of trueness” can be conceived through assessing how closely tied a belief is to given facts;1 however even here we run into problems. Science itself is useful, not true — it’s literally built on theories tested over and again, hopefully coming to conclusions that are less and less wrong over time.
What do you believe to be absolutely “true,” and how intensely are you holding onto it?
The second thought: Do we actually know what we believe, and can we choose what to believe?
We tell stories to ourselves about the world around us, often without realizing we’re doing so. (Also known as “framing” and “re-framing,” concepts Sivers explores further in his book.) We make up reasons for things that happen to us, for things we do and say to others. We think we’re telling people the truth by sharing what we believe to be facts, but we’re only sharing our perspectives on what is obvious.
What makes this already messy state-of-things more frustrating is how easily manipulated and cemented our beliefs, thoughts, and desires are by what’s around us. Emotions unhinge rational, linear processes. Subliminal advertising get you buying things thinking you actually want them, without realizing someone else spoke into your thoughts. Lack of sleep, heightened blood pressure, a carb-heavy lunch all affect the texture of our minds. The people around us slip us into subconscious moulds, ones we might never realize we’ve become trapped in. Our immediate environment shapes our mood, our thought patterns, our decision-making process.
Not the least of which is the factor of accepted belief systems. I was discussing this with my sister the other day. At one point, I asked her whether she believed in absolute, objective morality. Her answer, when it came down to the grittiness of “how come,” came down to “because she had to, given what else she also believed” (the God of the Bible, the Old and New Testament, etc.). She could not accept the possibility of relative morality and still hold onto her other beliefs — the resultant doublethink would go against her innate need for consistency in her beliefs. Which is understandable and to an extent unavoidable, as beliefs do tend to be connected and interdependent.
The danger comes in when we don’t recognize such belief systems for what they are, and bore or less blindly “believe along.” Without clarity on your metabeliefs — how and why you decide to believe what you believe — it’s easy to believe things “by accident” and not be able to go much further than a shrug when attempting to explain the deeper motivations for what you hold to.2
Here is an example of how existing beliefs lead to the acceptance or denial of other beliefs: That Jesus Christ was a real person who was crucified and rose again may be a historical fact. But what you believe about that determines what is true to you about it. The resurrection could “make it obvious” to me that He has to be God Himself, revealed as a man; the resurrection may make you doubt the validity of the entire Christian Gospel, precisely because some random guy coming back to life is such an absurd claim.
…And here’s where faith steps in.
***
Intermission: “When an agnostic lives by faith”
This may be a good time to slip in my personal story.
Rewind to my childhood, where I was brought up Christian, received Christ into my heart at five years old, and got baptized the same year. The next eleven years were marked by ups-and-downs as I memorized Scripture, went to church and fellowship gatherings, debated Calvinism vs. Arminianism, and helped at Vacation Bible Schools.
In my nineteenth year, a friend of mine (also raised Christian) raised questions regarding the validity, reliability, and consistency of the canonical Scriptures, many of which I could find no answers to. (Still cannot.) His foundational questions — “How do we know the Bible is really the Word of God, or that He communicates with us at all? How could we know God, a Being which is by definition unknowable?” — led me to explore my own beliefs deeper, tearing apart everything I’d taken for granted within “Christianity.”
The increasing, swirling thoughts of doubt and uncertainty (with a bit of bitterness against those who told me I was being rebellious, I should trust more, and asked me why you need answers to such questions) culminated into a state of agnosticm for about two years, during which I was still physically part of the Christian community, but mentally, spiritually, and emotionally adrift from the comfortable harbours that had been my internal and communal life.
It wasn’t until a new friend, himself a new convert, told me that the only reason he became a Christian is not because of the Bible, not because of this doctrine or that, but simply because of Christ. That intrigued me — I had an issue with how dogmatic many Christians’ beliefs seemed to be, that his answer of a being, of having a personal relationship instead of only intellectual belief as the foundation of his personal “faith journey,” made me want to take another look at Jesus Christ.
When I did, and came to understand him not as this distant, perfect God-man I had to believe on to “be saved”, but as a human being suffering what we all did yet did not waver from fully becoming what He was on the earth to do, having the faith to die for something greater and nobler beyond self — and so, so much more — I realized that all my life I’d trusted in Christ so that I could go to heaven after I die. So that I didn’t need to burn in hell. So that I could be accepted into my family and the communities they were part of. It was a belief prompted by fear, cocooned by a system of beliefs I could not wholeheartedly uphold.
But now it was different — now my faith stemmed from love and awe of such a person, to the point that even if He is not divine, even if He didn’t resurrect, His love and the life He lived was enough for me to drop all other allegiances and follow Him alone. Even if there’s no heaven at the end. (By the way, I don’t rest my hopes in there being one, though it’d be nice to find myself there.) Even if He asks me to walk through hell.
Am I deluding myself when I “sense His presence”? Am I hateful and exclusionary — not to mention irrationally inconsistent with all I’ve said up to this point — to believe that Christ is the Truth, with a capital T? Are my spoken prayers just words floating away in the wind? Am I doing all this “living as Christ, becoming the Word, following in His steps” thing for nothing? (By the way - here’s what I mean by ‘living for God,’ which may differ from what you assume.)
All I have is faith — that trust in something/someone outside of myself, a thing or being I cannot prove, convince you of, or demonstrate to your senses. That belief in something “by virtue of the absurd,”3 if you will.
In other words: this agnostic has finally admitted she must believe in something even if she does not know.
So yes, I could be delusional. I could be insane. I could be inconsistent.
The catch is, I’ve stopped caring.
Precisely because I recognize beliefs for what they are.
They don’t make something any less true or false, less real or unreal, less or more objectively meaningful or significant. They’re simply how I understand and interpret the world.
Do I want you to believe the same things I do? Yes, sure. That’s one reason why I shared my beliefs through my story above. But I don’t pressure you to convert, beg you to agree with me, force my convictions on you, because that would do no good. All I would do (and could do, really) is let you know where I stand on things, show you through my actions why and what it is I truly believe, and keep an open, humble mind.
Because while they’re useful, beliefs aren’t that important by themselves.
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The third thought: What makes a belief useful?
Simple: When it changes you — the way you live, the decisions you make, the actions you take with the facts that are.
(Implying, of course, that such changes bring you closer to what you’d like your life to be, or what you think it should be. If not, they’d be the opposite of useful…)
The fourth thought: Why hold onto useless beliefs?
Myriad theories about the world we live in and the people we share life with exist — some that people can get quite worked up over. Is the earth round or flat? A good response to that isn’t “You’re crazy,” “I’m right,” or even “What’s actually true?”
Perhaps the best one is “Does it matter?”
At one point, Dr. Watson tells Sherlock Holmes about how the planets are ordered in the heaven: Holmes stares blankly at his educated friend for a second, then says, “Well, now I shall try my best to forget it.” Not because it’s false or because he doesn’t believe it, but because it’s not worth believing in — it’s a line of thinking that leads nowhere and doesn’t affect anything in his reality.
This point in Sivers’ book is one that stuck with me the most, second only to the next point below. There are many beliefs I hold that don’t necessarily matter — especially the minor beliefs that make up a “belief system.” Such beliefs could be ignored and discarded (maybe even should be) so that new, more useful beliefs can be added in.
Or else, if you hold onto too many beliefs…
The fifth thought: What then is left as fact?
Actions. Reality. What you actually do. What actually happened.
The difference between belief and reality:
Belief: I’m a highly acclaimed published author.
Action: I printed out five copies of a short story, shared it with my friends, and they said I did a good job.
However, the track towards action from belief, Sivers notes, goes like this:
BELIEF → EMOTION → ACTION
Actions may lead to new beliefs. But because we’ve got to start somewhere — with a belief of some sort — we must first have reason to act a certain way.
Let’s look at an example of how Christianity may be useful as a belief:
What emotions it triggers: This belief makes existence less lonely, as direct communication with the Highest of Beings is opened. It also gives my own life a meaningful and noble goal, following in the footsteps of Someone so much greater and grander than I could ever be. (Within this is also the willingness to suffer and to carry on despite being misunderstood.) All this makes my life easier to live, and affords some security in the decisions I make based on “following Christ.” For others it may serve as a comfort during hard times or when facing death, believing that there’d be a place of peace, rest, and comfort after the present suffering. Others may experience relief from “escaping hell.”
What actions it leads to: I pray, fast, read the Scriptures, and try to exemplify the character of Christ in my daily living. Through giving of myself and resources with the assurance (by faith) that such sacrifices are acceptable to and accepted by God, I continue to practice kindness and patience, showing grace to those around me because of the grace God has shown me through Christ.
Many of these emotional benefits and caused actions can come from other religions, which leads me to an interesting conclusion (one that, though some of my Christian readers may raise their eyebrows at, is upheld by Scripture),4 which is this:
It matters what you do, not what you believe.
Or, as Sivers puts it:
Your self-image doesn’t matter as much.
When you realize what you need to do, it doesn’t mean that’s who you need to be. You can just pretend.
For one who loves to think and think (and think) about what sort of a person to become, reading these lines feels like being slammed face-down onto concrete, hauled back to my feet, and being told to “shoo off and get busy.”
It brings to mind a short story I love by Miguel de Unamuno, called “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr.” It’s the tale of a man of God who lived a life of outward calm and self-sacrificial service to others, bringing peace and joy to hundreds though riddled through and through with excruciating doubt himself.
I’d like to think (←notice the layers of subjective emotion and belief there) that God would be more pleased with a life like that, than one where I believed all the right things but didn’t do anything about it.
Which also raises the question: Can actions be ever divorced from beliefs, and vice versa? Even if you claim not to believe in a God or Higher Power, yet you live as though there is one — do you actually believe in “no God,” or are you kidding yourself? And if you “believe” in a certain code of morals but do nothing to align your behaviour to it, do you truly believe it?
The sixth thought: So what now?
I invite you to revisit your beliefs, your dependence on them, and your understanding of what they are in your life.
Beliefs can be useful (and if they are, they should be kept). But perhaps we shouldn’t see them as either true/false, black/white all the time. Some can be “not true” and still be worth keeping. Others may be “true” but not useful (or not even classify as a “belief” or something that necessitates faith).
Finally — and it should already be obvious, but it bears stating: You are not your beliefs. Work with them, analyze and test them, but don’t grip them with a concrete fist. Evangelism (religious or otherwise) takes on a new twist with this understanding: instead of stating what you believe to be true as the one and only “truth” out there, you show others what life lived by holding the beliefs you do looks like, and share what you believe and why when asked. (Hopefully the way of life you present would be worth emulating — remember, it’s what your beliefs lead you to do that counts.)
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This has been a long and convoluted piece; if you’ve made it this far, I thank and applaud you, and hope it wouldn’t make you more of a bobblehead than is absolutely necessary.
If anything, let’s be less confident and more humble with what we believe.
Now go and take a walk outside to rest your mind. :)
Odelia
P.S. Notice how weak and unsure a piece of writing seems when every other line begins with “I think” and “I believe”? But also — notice how you cannot escape that reality even when you try to take them out? All you can write is what you think, what you believe. It would never be something that just “is”, apart from your mind, since that’s where it came from. As Sivers puts it, you never share facts, just perspectives. So try to make your writing sound strong and objective while knowing it really isn’t.
P.P.S. So much of Jacob Lee’s music revolves around the personal aspects and costs of wrestling with thoughts, life, and God Himself on an intellectual level. Recommended, if you find such thinks fascinating.
Quote for the week
Something that impacted me in some way the past week, and think is worth sharing.
“When faced with a difficult decision, choose the thing/person/action that requires the most faith but produces the most peace.”
— Wei Wei
This week’s word: “La cuna”
Since the start of 2024, I’ve begun a project of writing 7 poems, 3 songs, and 1 short story each week, using for my prompt an entry from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. I share the best from said project in this section.
la cuna
n. a twinge of sadness that there’s no frontier left, that as the last explorer trudged with his armies toward a blank spot on the map, he didn’t suddenly remember his daughter’s upcoming piano recital and turn for home, leaving a new continent unexplored so we could set its mists and mountains aside as a strategic reserve of mystery, if only to answer more of our children’s questions with “Nobody knows! Out there, anything is possible.”
***
No corner unsearched
Eyes are never satisfied
Lost though he knows all
***Find me outdoors
Photos and/or thoughts during my off-grid project.
A handful of snails from Thursday’s dinner, with a bit of quinoa:
Give this a peep
Dance and martial arts together. Quite a stunning performance!
Bullet notes from my desk
A thought I’d like to develop in the future: Our brains build and run on their own algorithms, blinding us to things we’d otherwise see and suggesting things to us for “no reason”. What’s going on there?
My family has a few slang terms we use among ourselves: one that seems vaguely connected to today’s post is “so be.” Said in an sassy tone of voice with a certain tilt of the head, “so be” roughly means “I’m gonna say/do/think this anyways, I couldn’t careless about what you think, so try to stop me.” I’m probably philosophizing too hard on this, but here goes. It almost seems like the speaker understands that all the other person could do is be whoever they are, and that it doesn’t need to affect or influence them more than they allow, once they’re conscious of the interaction. So be.
There is a whole other discussion to be had on how we could know “facts” to be what we interpret them to be, as in how we must suspend disbelief in our own thoughts, our senses, and the correlation between the two — or else succumb to clinical insanity. All of us operate from presuppositions that we dare not question, cannot allow ourselves to not hold as absolutely true — things like consciousness, for example. In a sense, then, there is no way to exist as an intelligent being without a sort of desperate, irrational “faith” in rationality itself — a desperation deeper and more acute than our need for physical sustenance. I suppose this is part of what the Scriptures mean when it says that everything is created and held together by the Word, the Logos, the Reason. If we were to deny even this “faith”, there is nothing but the darkest sort of lobotomy, the kind that is eternal and internal. And so we never dare to admit that we actually don’t truly know, could not know anything - we only think we do (and believe so), despite the yawning, infinite unknown lurking at the edges of our minds.
Not everyone enjoys to tease these things out in their minds. Perhaps many are not able to. Such statements are not meant as judgements against people content with operating at the level of beliefs, emotions, and facts as they are. But for those of us who seem to relish a good headache every once in a while, metabeliefs are worth developing + tracking over time. If only just for fun. ;)
Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard. This concept is mentioned time and time again in the book.
See James 1:27, Micah 6:8, Ecclesiastes 12:13, for starters.