OK, I have come to a similar conclusion that relying on a positive belief in ’someone’ or ’something’ else (I would ask you to note the word ‘positive’ as being crucial here), fills a terrifying alternative void for the human state – fear, loneliness, insecurity and purposelessness.

Letting go or challenging a deeply held belief can be traumatic, as we need something else of equal or ideally superior quality to replace it with. Letting go of God, little green men from Mars or whatever you believe, challenges our individual sense of ourselves and existence in the world.

Having no beliefs undermines the logic of our perceived reality and mental operational instructions. We turn our mental ‘always on’ processing, in on ourselves because there is no context, reference or parameters to live by. Hence, beliefs are fundamental in my view to switching on our ‘internal engines’ and living to our individual potential.

The quality of your beliefs seems directly proportional to whether you live a life of ‘existence’ or ‘flourish’. As in nature, some survive, some die off and some thrive. It seems to be a well organised self selecting proposition to encourage survival of the fittest.

Negative led beliefs create tightly defined states of existence and anxiety, whereas genuinely concluded positive beliefs create breadth of opportunity and perspective. In their purest form, genuinely held positive beliefs seem to release our inate human potential and limitless boundaries and opportunities. Our opportunity to survive and prosper.

Beliefs are our selves trying to make sense of our environment and experiences. However, our minds are not foolproof. They make the best choices they can at the time in interpretation of the information they are receiving and in subsequently coding and categorising the information in our memories. The issue is, we act as our own quality assurance department in relation to the conclusions and interpretations we reach. This is a fundamental issue! Hence, the potential for us to create distorted or unhelpful (there is no reality just perception) conclusions to extract and generalise into conclusions, rules and ultimately beliefs, is immense!

My advice is to challenge your views and beliefs for context and try to de-personalise and objectify them in a neutral way before making meaning of them. Most of us are creating ego centric meanings of our experiences in life (as is natural) but failing to challenge or ‘quality assure’ them for helpfulness, context or objectiveness.

My view is we absolutely need beliefs to exist. Without them we neurologically explode – ie. we just become paralysed without beliefs to guide and motivate us. Hence, choose your beliefs wisely. Choose those that you genuinely, robustly and objectively have evaluated as being right for you BUT always ensure they are helpful to you and the world in which we live in. It is not about whether they are ‘true’ as we can only perceive our realities, it is however more important for them to be ‘helpful and true to you’

The challenge to this level of thinking is, if your belief in the above makes sense, then it raises the following question: ‘If we choose our beliefs and interpretation of the world or reality (as I personally believe we can and do), then with such choice, what is the ‘purpose’ of our lives?’ Please note, there is a belief in this last statement that there has to be a purpose! Perhaps there does not? However, if we can self actualise and guide ourselves, then do we need a ‘destination’ for our lives that represents a ‘purpose’ for our lives, or, does this logic re-present the same ‘terrifying’ thought proposed earlier in this post, that there is no purpose to our lives?

It raises the question of how confident we are to genuinely believe in ‘nothing’ versus ’something’ or ’someone?’ I would love to hear others thoughts on this if my post makes sense?!!

I do think God wants us to believe in ourselves and he wants us to learn – sometimes painfully. I guess if everything was mapped out for us, life would be boring.

I’m not keen on organized religion though. I can understand the comfort being part of a particular church must bring. But I like to try to work things out for myself.
Check out Cath Lawson´s last blog…Be Smart Like An Animal

Sounds like you’ve had your fair share of tough times, and I wonder if it’s faith in God that you’ve lost or faith in yourself. Yes, I keep coming back to the separateness of it. You don’t have to buy into someone else’s community if it doesn’t make sense or fit with your values, but in no way does that diminish your values or what you hold dear. Far from it.

The power equation’s an interesting one, and is something I’ll need to mull on as it’s a new spin on this for me. There’s something there, because for me, believing in God has ramifications of giving away your power to an abstraction, an external something. Believing in me, in the core of me and all that that means, is the very definition of power. To me, at least.

Thanks for such a thoughtful comment.