things are probably going to get better soon (relatively speaking)

if i appeared to be making a case for eliminating belief then this would be another example of my poor ability to explain my own thoughts.

not believing the santa claus story does not imply an absence of belief. same with use of the Burqua.

these are nothing more than systems of control. so if you understand that (even if you are five years old) you have an edge on the rest of the world. and you can be thinking about ways to get out of your situation if that is what you need to do. then you can make a choice.

you know at least one person who does not believe just about everything around them. that is me.

for a long time i went right along with it but at some point it just stopped making sense and it is not always particularly pleasant living this way but it is a choice.

i think the true scientist is always hoping that his/her conclusion will be transcended as you say with a more complete belief. call it refined. yes, this is part of the question of understanding belief to begin with. that is where i like to tell myself that i am. sure i believe certain things about certain things and i am always willing to update those beliefs when new information comes along. infinite empiricism rules.

the popular argument against that is to portray it as a pointless existence centered on doubt and negativism. but this too is just another attempted system of fear based control. ultimately a lot more gets learned when a lot more is doubted. when it became obvious to me how much there was to know and how little i would ultimately know it was a very cathartic realization to say wow so i get to learn something new constantly. how cool is that.

i also understand that everyone has a unique perspective and that there are lots of different beliefs resulting from that but i am committed to not encouraging people to believe junk. so if i find someone who appears to be committed to junk ideas i just keep my distance. this is a sort of passive resistance to junk thinking. if i get pinged on something that i have given a good deal of thought to however then i generally have something to say. and sadly for me, it often comes out in a caustic sort of way. this is good old New York enculturation.

generally there is a giant shortage of empathy in the world. or at least the expression of it. the way it appears to me, getting along is not much more complicated than understanding that concept.

i believe that there already is a common morality. always has been, always will be. the generic term for it is empathy.

we all know it intuitively. it is pretty apparent in children pre language acquisition. you can see it in their frequent expressions of empathy.

i believe that our in-ability to practice it actively comes along post language acquisition. because language is always partial. always assumptions of assumptions and most people fail to give that any thought. most children are taught that not knowing an answer is bad so most stop asking questions at some point early in the game and just succumb to the systems of control. particularly the fear based ones. toe the line in their immediate vicinity and survive at some level. recognizing at some point how often they were lied to with impunity and not being able to do a whole lot about that, other than seethe with anger.

maybe this explains why so many people fly off the handle when their opinions are challenged in any way.? or why so many scheme to deceive others?

there have been a number of people who have come to understand this in the last two or three thousand years and when they attempted to explain what they came to see, it all gets muddled with language. eventually some creative manipulator puts together another system of fear based control using fragmented pieces of those observations. the cycle continues.

my ideas about belief come from Krishnamurti. yes, there appears to be a contradiction in the absolute certainty of non absoluteness and i do not particularly mind being here because the belief that i hold in this only comes from having systematically ruled out all of the other popular possibilities that i have looked at. including what i understand Denett, Harris etc to be saying along with the way that they are saying it.

it is something akin to the truth in the statement that the only thing that does not change is that things are changing all of the time.

while these statements may appear to be recursively contradictory on the surface, they are probably just very clear examples of the poor quality of language as a medium for the expression of truthful phenomenon.

if you think about it, in terms of the length of time that most things that are around have been around, it is still early days for language, not to mention belief systems. so things are probably going to get better in the next few million years. i believe that.