The Dark Side of Belief

We live in a culture where we make choices on a daily basis about the things we believe to be true. Did I get the right toothpaste? Do I trust it to fight gingivitis? Does gingivitis even exist or is that just toothpaste company propaganda? Do they just tell us that so that so that we can make uninformed decisions about toothpaste a little bit easier? Few people really believe in a particular brand of toothpaste, we just know that it gives us confidence and sustains the whiteness of our teeth.

But more often than not, in America, we have lost the necessity to really believe in something. I’m not talking about a belief in the same capacity that little children believe in Santa Claus or the way a gambler believes in his lucky numbers, the belief I speak of is much greater than that. It’s life changing belief, the belief that transitions you from apathy to enthusiasm and from idleness to liveliness. The kind that helped establish this country, the beliefs in freedom and liberty, those were life changing beliefs.

News is important to me. I like to be informed of what is going on in this world. I don’t want to be naïve, uneducated, or clueless, whether it is politics or world events. I look at the world we live in now, the fights, the protests, the disagreements, the riots over cartoons of the prophet Mohammed (in eastern cultures) and it is apparent what happens when a powerful belief in something goes terribly wrong, when belief manifests itself into fanaticism, when logic turns into a primitive form of survival.

We don’t get that here. We live in a country that is continuing to learn how to accept people from different heritages, cultures, and beliefs. We live in a country where Muslims can go on lunch breaks with Christians, without the need for roadside bombs or heat seeking missiles, where a Muslim and a Jew can coexist at a Marilyn Manson concert, all because fanaticism is frowned upon here (unless you’re the Philly fanatic, the loveable mascot for the Philadelphia Phillies, a major league baseball team).

Fanaticism will be the destroyer of this earth, the way that Nazism was the destroyer of an era of Jews. It leaves no capacity for good, and opens all doors for evil. All around the world the evidence is becoming insurmountable. Witness the civil wars in Sudan, the extremism in Iraq, the fanaticism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the leader of Iran, all the symptoms of a sincere belief in something, gone terribly wrong.

It’s difficult to understand because Americans live in a world where our beliefs are too often unchallenged, our attention constantly competed for, and our lifestyles considered one of a sediment nature if we have more than two hours of spare time a day. I could live my life without ever having to truly believe in something that is life changing. I could live with the belief that my toaster will toast my bread, that my newspaper will continue to arrive if I keep my subscription, and that milk does the body good. As a society we are on the right side of fanaticism, but on the left side of a willingness to really believe something and live it out. We are lukewarm, at best. Yet, in moments of disaster we come together like no other country in the world and we finally believe in something. And in those moments, we get some sort of glimpse into what the world was supposed to look like. We believe.