An introduction into believing

There is not a single religious person who wouldn't say that he believes in something, yet I maintain that very few people, religious or not, clearly understand what it means to believe.

When Jesus speaks of believing, what does he usually say? Thy faith has made thee whole.

There are those who only get sick when they feel like it. What about the others? According to the Lord they lack faith.

A man can decide to go to church, give alms, but can he decide to believe?

What do I believe?

I believe that the state of the future is determined by the state of the present, that is that there is a reason for everything that happens.

I believe that my mood reflects the world and that the world reflects my mood.

I believe that I'm able to voluntarily engage in mental activity and know it, when I've chosen to do so, and if so, also what motivated me, what kind of activity it was and what it refers to.

The first and third belief may seem ridiculous and the second outrageous, but I think these are really all the beliefs there are.

The first belief is called the rational belief, the second the belief in a responsive God and the third the belief in personal autonomy.

Strictly speaking God enters only after applying the rational belief to the second belief as a necessary part of the world to fully account for the expected correspondence. Or God enters another way, namely through invalidation of one's personal autonomy, i.e. through revelation, on account of which we may want to rephrase that belief to that we're generally able to voluntarily engage in mental activity (and on account of sleep and the like).

Anyway, if we did not believe in a responsive God, why would we pray? But perhaps I'm being presumptuous here. I'm assuming of course that God listens to our heart. Someone might believe God responds to words or offerings instead. But that someone wouldn't be a Christian, in my estimation.

The generally accepted idea of a responsive God is, also by Hindus and Muslims, by the way, that our mood tells us something about the right way to be and if we take heed and attune ourselves we can hope for God's inclusion of our specific longings into his general plan. It is not really so, it only appears to us this way. In reality God had the inclusion planned from the start. But we are not omniscient, for us the future isn't written.

So we experience that rejecting sin and manifesting the virtues God has seeded in our hearts brings us in some inexplicable way closer to Him, and when we pray then we may find that He hears us. But that is only the one side of the coin, the other is of course how important the prayer is.

Either way, our basic belief has led us to attuning ourselves and prayer and then the experience of prayer becomes the foundation of a more refined belief.

The only alternative is revelation. And revelation is terrifying, because you realise that you're not the master of your own mind. Ironically, it is Douglas Adams who found the perfect metaphor for it: The people on Krikkit never looked up, because their sky didn't show any stars, until one day something fell from the sky and they became obsessively aware of that never before considered dimension. So it is with revelation, your mind is like a room with only three walls, but the void on the fourth side you never face. Until something intrudes.

How responsible is it, to teach people to go and see what's there? When it happens, it happens, but revelation is no way to live. So there is really just the path of attuning oneself according to one's mood. Then, when there is faith in worldly correspondence, that faith can grow through the experience of its reality.