Belief...

My wife was watching a show on ghosts and it amazed me how scared she can get out of watching these shows. It is funny to me how many people belive in such ridiculous things.  From god to aliens people believe things without any factual evidence to support them.   I watched a video by Richard Dawkins on a letter he wrote his daughter as far as belief goes, and he said that he wished his daughter to never trust, tradition, authority, and revelance, for your belief. I love this statement because with tradition, authority, and revelance is where you can find the ridiculous beliefs...

Tradition and authority are how most beliefs are learned.  It was essential for our survival to follow our parents and to have them guide and protect us.  We were a blank slate that leaned on our authority figures to learn all aspects of the world.  They taught us things that were not essentially the truth but in order for us to do as they say without question they made it the truth such as "do not cross the street or you will get run over". Now there is a chance that you can get run over by crossing the street, the likelihood maybe at the most 1 in 10, but for us to be completely safe they made sure we believed that we would be hit if we crossed.  The funny thing is what we learn early is hard to break. This is where religion gets it strength. They prey on the young to instill fear of a god that knows all and can hear your thoughts. Pretty daunting and its roots of fear are grounded in the youth. Why does this work? The same way we come up to a street with appehension, same reason that we hesitate to touch a stove that we know if off,   This is what our parents taught us, and their parents taught them and this is where tradition lies. What we remember from our parents, we teach our children. This is weird because when we reflect back at our parents we realize how wrong they were on things, yet we still pass their teachings on to our kids.

Revelance is where something just feels right and so many people belief stuff based on their feelings and senses. They constantly say stuff like I felt a presence using thier sense as a guide to belief. The problem is that our senses do not always tell the truth.  Have you ever touched really hot water and get a cold sensation? Have you ever answered someone because you thought you heard them talking to you? Have you tried the experiment of smelling a lemon while tasting a banana and then the banana ends up tasting like a lemon? Of course, we all have had instances where our senses have deceived us. We know that our senses deceive but yet we can not break the belief, or even question what we have seen.  As if our processing agent, the brain, would not dare make a mistake. 

I am a skeptic and I do not understand how so many people can have a supernatural answer for things that do not make sense at the time. Why not look at things scientifically and look for factual evidence through experiments? This is a way to prove thier beliefs, and shouldn't that alarm them that there is not any scientific evidence as of yet on god, or on aliens, or on the existence of ghosts.  With everyone out to make a dollar it would seem as if they would want science to prove these things as true, to truly capitalize on the phenomena. Science is debunking more and more beliefs and it is under contstant attack. People are really wrapped into their beliefs no matter how wrong they are and will doubt and even hate people that bring factual evidence that denies thier beliefs,  I can't think of a better example than evolution. I guess that is why con-artists are so successful, because of the gullability of humanity...