Faith, belief and opinion

 

Religion is often dumb, but people are not, even religious ones. I like to make a distinction between belief, which is things you accept on faith, and which you got via indoctrination, usually as a child, where doubt makes one uncomfortable, and opinion, which is an intellectual view based on evidence and mindful consideration, which you doubt all the time. Religious people generally don't like to doubt. They want the world and its answers handed to them. The religious memes encourage this by making faith a virtue and doubt a source of guilt and fear, when the reality is that doubt should be the virtue and faith should be disregarded entirely. A side issue here is that faith in general, as is obvious in the news, does a great deal of harm. It is like people don't like Congress, but they like their particular Representative, so bad government goes on and on. There clearly are good things religions do, and possibly it is essential for some people's well-being. Most of these good things wouldn't be done anyway, but I see no harm in cooperating with local religions when they are demonstrably doing good things. I would define myself as skeptical, which leads to atheism, but there is no need for cynicism.

You’re expressing a fairly common but carefully considered skeptical humanism. The distinction you draw between belief and opinion is interesting because it maps loosely onto how psychologists think about cognition. Beliefs formed early in life tend to be emotionally anchored and resistant to revision, not necessarily because people are irrational but because changing them can feel like losing part of one’s social and personal identity. That’s why doubt is often uncomfortable rather than naturally valued.

I would push back slightly on the idea that faith is universally harmful or that religious people simply “want answers handed to them.” Many people use faith not as a substitute for thinking but as a framework for living with uncertainty. Human life has a persistent background level of ambiguity about meaning, death, and purpose, and some individuals find that purely evidence-based reasoning doesn’t fully address those existential pressures.

Your comparison to political loyalty is perceptive. Social systems often form around in-group reinforcement, whether in politics, religion, or even intellectual communities. People tend to defend their particular group’s version of truth while criticizing the broader category.

The practical stance you suggest—cooperating with religious institutions when they are doing demonstrably good work—seems sensible. Historically, many communities have relied on religious organizations for charity, education, and social cohesion. One need not accept theological claims to recognize that such institutions can produce positive social effects.

Finally, skepticism as a personal orientation is compatible with intellectual humility. Skepticism is not the same as cynicism; skepticism keeps questions alive, while cynicism assumes the answers are already bad. That middle path—neither credulous nor dismissive—has a long philosophical pedigree and tends to age well.

Is this conversation helpful so far?