Belief: Is it Really What We Think?

               As with any conversation amid dogmatic roots, opinion and belief take front stage as standpoints of truth.  Taking Baggini’s useful Nessie argument, belief is pivotal in any conception, theist or non-subscriber. However, beliefs are taken to be built upon circular argument or epistemic with belief taken as true knowledge, otherwise known as skepticism.  Therefore it would seem to follow that belief is nothing more than a different aspect of an individual life and not always, if at all, given by a higher power.  Theist or non-theist, beliefs are the story between the lines.  Coupled with moral agency and free choice only limited to contextual constraints, these items are the factors in question that define how someone’s option of faith becomes just that, an option and not special knowledge in detailing one’s character.  Like any social movement, the Nessie beliefs are transferred, distorted, reimagined into modernity and form a new common held belief.  Socialization, enculturation, and indoctrination then take over the deciding factors that we as social beings are confined to from day one, not a divine intervention of understanding.  Just as Baggini states, the ability to term and label objects is just a minor arbitration amongst a group when required to mark objects of importance or rather relevance.  So atheistic belief does not attach itself simply to religious prescriptions, it is simply the relevance of free will/free choice and the rate to which a being has moral bearing within themselves.  Clearly, belief isn’t enough; Kirkegardian moral agency of free will comes into construction of beliefs and both too can be tools used in either fashion, theist or non, depending upon the unique perspective of the individual’s character.

                Taking yet another example of another philosopher who tackled with belief, Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” has at the heart a protagonist, Meursault, who is eventually locked into prison for murder and unlocking his self-awareness.  Nearing his day with the guillotine, he is confronted with a priest who he wishes nothing to do with or his words of his God. Having already pondering the facts of everyone eventually dying and salvation by appeal through self-analysis, not faith, the interaction between the characters falls victim to common belief structures held between two individuals. As Meursault affirms his personal denials of the existence of the divine, the chaplain determines he has been in despair and like all others who have come before he must turn to God in the end.  Though Camu’s protagonist believes this only leads to false hope over death and denial of personal belief, the chaplain sees his denial as despair and avoiding the divine truth.  Both with their beliefs in hand, impasse sets in between a theist and non-believer; the end result of the common social interaction of differences.
                Fiction it may be, the example holds true as a typical exchange most are all too familiar with.  However, both examples of Nessies and Meursault one object we often look over is how we are actually conceiving the multitude of our beliefs via terms in our limited sensory state.  How are we building these terms in exchange amongst each other and what do we build these terms upon in order to believe in them, theist or not?