Belief in… Belief

Belief in belief, and hope in hope… The despair of our gen­er­a­tion, and our youth.

What I mean is that there is a sense (at least among the peo­ple I’ve encoun­tered) that belief and hope are, in and of them­selves, good things, even if these same peo­ple con­sider belief in a cer­tain god, or hope in a cer­tain event (i.e. the res­ur­rec­tion) to them­selves be bad (because they are exclu­sive, or what­ever else). The result­ing view is that it’s good to believe, and it’s good to have hope, but there’s no object of belief, and no object of hope. So instead of believ­ing and hop­ing in some­thing out­side of them­selves, they look into them­selves and their idea of “belief” and “hope,” and that’s what they believe and hope towards. But what is the result when you “believe in belief”? Noth­ing, it’s despair­ing if you con­sider it hon­estly, because you real­ize that the only thing you believe and hope towards is an empty con­cept, a reflec­tion of your­self. Why do you believe? Because belief is good. Why is belief good? Because it gives you hope. Why is hope good? Because it gives you some­thing to believe in. It’s cir­cu­lar, a self-referential hell. When some­thing is “true” only because you believe it, I don’t believe you’re believ­ing in much else other than yourself.

Related posts:

1. Galileo: His­tor­i­cal Chris­t­ian (Church) Belief?