Gongol.com Archives: July 2024

July 15, 2024

If a belief in human agency goes any farther than pure lip service, then everyone who possesses ordinary mental faculties faces a common challenge: To come up with some form of belief system by which to make the important decisions in life. The process is usually messy, since a belief system will ordinarily touch on aspects of life ranging from politics to religion and spirituality to family life to civic notions of duty and justice. ■ The process isn't even laid out in a straightforward way: Americans nominally obtain legal adulthood at the age of 18, whether they've wrestled with any of those questions or not. Religions and cultural institutions choose a range of ages upon which to confer adulthood. The tax collector, meanwhile, can start dipping into paychecks early on, putting a spin on the alert youth's understanding of fairness quite early on. ■ Some people then go on to achieve notoriety or even fame for their choice of belief system. This attention doesn't often seem to follow those who arrived at their belief systems slowly and organically. We seem to have far more stories resembling Saul on the road to Damascus. The phrase, after all, is "zeal of the convert". ■ Even though a person may sincerely hold beliefs -- new or old -- it doesn't necessarily follow that other people need to defer to the seriousness of those beliefs. Zeal and sincerity don't necessarily make a belief right or wrong. ■ That seems important to recall in times when emphatic opinions are never beyond arm's reach. Real honesty about a belief comes with an obligation to paint a boundary around its limitations. Just as people need to recognize their individual circles of competence, we need to recognize the boundaries around belief systems. Nobody should be trusted with their belief in a thing until they also know what tempers their belief in that same thing.