It's Sunday. How About a Sermon?

This being the Christian holy day and all I thought I might take a moment away from my constant struggles with Lucifer to contemplate my understanding of belief, that wondrous rock on which all religion is founded whether it calls you to worship on Friday, Saturday or Sunday or not at all.

Religious belief is made the more curious by how much of it there is scattered about every corner of the world. He believes this. She believes that. The family over there, the one with all the wives, well they believe something else altogether. It seems there are as many beliefs as there are calls for them. They come and go. New ones pop up. Old ones fall into desuetude (neat word, eh?).

Religion is an organizational construct of true believers, on one side, and infidels, apostates, heathens and pagans on the other. It may have distinctive features like an afterlife or hell. It may have one God or scores of Gods. Sometimes it is spread on foot, by word of mouth. Sometimes it arrives on the blade of a sword. Whatever it takes, it gets around.

It can get confusing. "Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." There's a dandy little phrase for sacking a town that holds true believers and infidels alike. Kill them all. God will know his own. Sorry folks. Some of you, anyway.

Religious belief is something you take on faith. You need faith that your chosen belief is real, that it is the true religion that stands alone among all the false religions.  What a predicament that poses. According to Wiki there are loads of religions, around 4,200 in all. You take it on faith that 4,199 of those are false religions.  Me, well.  We can bicker about that last one. You can tell the good faiths because they have their own, more or less identifiable, symbols or logos (see above).

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against religion per se. After all, if you don't believe in 4,199 of the known religions while my tally is 4,200, we're really not that far apart, are we? That's a difference of 0.0238 per cent. We're awfully close. You have to give me that one.

The problem is that we're humans and our species doesn't deal well with religious belief. The point cannot be seriously argued. Since we invented the wheel, perhaps even before, we've been using our true religion as an excuse to slaughter the neighbours. We're in a holy war now, a jihad. This is in the tradition of a thousand years of Christians and Muslims having at each other. Look at the history of the Middle East, especially what we today conveniently call the "Holy Land." One conquering army after another carried a gaggle of peoples and their religions to and fro across that turf although we've settled on the idea that our God gave it to the Israelis. We take that on faith and we're prepared to see loads of blood shed for our belief. There we go, faith and belief again.

Yet the real problem posed by belief probably isn't some religious angle. It may be our willingness to allow belief to reign over some pretty worrisome knowledge.

We like to think of ourselves as Master of the Universe. At least on secular matters we think of ourselves as omnipotent. Just look around. We're the highest order of life as we know it. I believe we're the Top Dog.

It's not easy being master of all we survey. We need rules that we gather into codes, written, sometimes unwritten, sometimes a bit of both. We have rules defining statehood, rules for trade, rules dictating how ships must pass each other at sea, rules of war for when we're simply not getting along.

Accumulate enough rules and you'll wind up with modes of organization on a societal or even civilizational scale. We are organized socially, politically, geopolitically, economically, and industrially. It's all based on "norms" or standards that we believe are meet and just and, by and large, we're expected to take that on faith.

A lot of our secular beliefs seem eerily similar to what we see in religious belief. Ideologies are belief based. We believe them to be true. Economics and other social sciences, are largely belief based. They're the thinking of the day around which we build a consensus that can be, like most faiths, rather tenuous and transitory, often inconsistent or even contradictory.

A fine example of contemporary belief-based constructs is neoliberal economics of the type sparked by Hayek and Friedman. Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney picked that ball up and ran with it. It wasn't long before everyone else fell in line. We took it on faith.  More than a decade ago John Ralston Saul proclaimed neoliberal globalism dead. He observed that it was just another failed economic religion in a long series of successive economic religions that tend to enjoy a 30-year shelf life until they're displaced by the next great thing. We're still waiting for that next great thing even as the perils and pitfalls of the neoliberal order becomes so glaring that even the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have turned their back on it in shame.

Since we're doing such a lousy job of getting out from under the scourge of neoliberalism and, while we're waiting for the next big thing to materialize, the safe bet might be to wean ourselves from belief-based thinking and veer to the safety of knowledge-based thinking. As legendary sleuth, hard-bitten sergeant Joe Friday would  put it, "Just the facts, ma'am."

Knowledge, evidence based knowledge. Facts. Science. Experiments, studies, research, analysis, testing, observations, verification. Stuff you don't have to believe or take on faith. Stuff you can verify and accept.

It's when we try to lacquer over knowledge with a thick coat of belief that we stray into trouble.  Too many of us fall back on belief as a means of thwarting knowledge. Take climate change. Harper believed it was a socialist plot. Trump believes it is a Chinese hoax. Plenty of people believe that it's not man-made. They're constantly exhorted not to believe the science. It's a giant scam perpetrated by scientists out to protect their lavish, five figure salaries.

Wait a second. The science community isn't peddling belief. They're not asking you to take their knowledge on faith. Especially on climate change.  That's science of all disciplines - physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology, glaciology, oceanography, hydrology, atmospherics, zoology, botany, biology, marine biology, epidemiology, agronomy, just about any Earth or life science.  Each discipline tests the central hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. And, with its own tests, and research and analysis, each discipline validates the central hypothesis.

My point is that, if we're going to get through this century with some vestiges of our civilization intact that's going to require us to relegate the belief and the faith-based stuff to our religious needs and aspirations and go with the knowledge-based stuff, the science, wherever else it's needed. We have a lot of mental catching up to do.