How do you know what to believe?

I belive double blinded randomised controled trials published in reputable peer reviewed journals and that have been critically apraised by lightlyseared.

What?

There are just some ideas and beliefs that I absolutely cannot wrap my brain around so I typically don’t believe in them.

I only believe the news when it comes from a pretty brunette on cable TV with lots of fancy graphics and short words that don’t hurt my head.

Everything else has a liberal bias.

The scientific method when used in good science is a process based on evidence—objective, meaningful, significant evidence—not social constructions—that is why we can trust it. You should choose what you believe by whether or not they practice good science and/or (in cases where the scientific method is not applicable) by sources that have sound logic or have proven themselves reliable in the past.

From Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion:

“Philosophers, especially amateurs with with a little philosophical learning and even more especially those infected with ‘cultural relativism’, may raise a tiresome red herring at this point: a scientist’s belief in evidence is itself a matter of fundamentalist faith. [...] All of use believe in evidence in our own lives, whatever we may profess with our amateur philosophical hats on. If I am accuse of murder, and the prosecuting counsel sternly asks me whether it is true that I was in Chicago on the night of the crime, I cannot get away with a philosophical evasion: ‘It depends what you mean by “true”.’ Nor with an anthropological, relativist plea: ‘It is only in your Western sense of “in” that I was in Chicago. The Bongolese have a completely different concept of “in”, according to which you are only truly “in” a place if you are an anointed elder entitled to take snuff from the dried scrotum of a goat.”

And I’m not sure you’re right about this growing “minority of True Believers” who are “disorienting [...] the rest of the population.” Do you have evidence that they are doing as strongly as you say they are? You cite global warming as an example of a place where people aren’t sure whether or not to put their trust in science, and yet I suspect that more people believe in global warming now than did five years ago. So that would suggest a weakening of these “True Believers” not a strengthening.

MontyZuma:
“So, the question is who do you trust as an authority?”
Someone who has no particular stake in the outcome.

” How did you pick them?”
By evaluating their track record

“How do you tell fact from bullpuckey?”
See above.

” How do you guard against self-deception or being fooled in other ways?”
By not having a vested interest in a specific outcome.

“Do degrees and credentials make a difference?”
Only in so far as they do inform us as to a person’s knowledge in a specific area. But there are many examples of highly intelligent, non-degreed persons who have developed outstanding ideas and theories.

“Is ideology a factor in who you believe or disbelieve?”
Ideoloogy is a vested interest.

” Are there opinion leaders you follow?”
If you mean follow as to read their opinions, there would be many.
If you mean unwavering belief in, no.

“Do you have some method or discipline or skill you rely upon to get to the bottom of things?”
Methodolgy is dependent on the nature of this issue, but all require the use of intelligence, logic, desire and effort.

” And do you believe what you believe with absolute certainty?”
It depends on which meaning of belief is involved in your question:
1: a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing
2: something believed ; especially : a tenet or body of tenets held by a group
3: conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence

@MontyZuma
Unless I’m mistaken, you just pinned a whole lot of unwarranted blame on postmodernism. Most of the problems you describe would be more accurately ascribed to regular old modernism. I’ve known for a while that postmodernism is a popular scapegoat in a large segment of Christian subculture—it would appear that this misapprehension is more widespread than I had thought.

@lapilofu “And I’m not sure you’re right about this growing “minority of True Believers” who are “disorienting [...] the rest of the population.” Do you have evidence that they are doing as strongly as you say they are?

This is more of an observation than anything I can operationalize and quantify. But I am not the only one who has noticed this. Al Gore talks about it at length in his book “The Assault on Reason.”

Look, for example, at how economic fundamentalism has derailed any serious conversation about the economy in the current election. We have just committed ourselves to $850 billion for an economic bailout package, at a cost of around $2800 per man, woman, and child. Yet McCain/Palin are basically promising that we can pull this off without raising taxes, and have been trying to beat up Obama for his modest tax proposal. This spills over into the general discourse. The traditional market fundamentalist bromides of “smaller government,” “lower taxes” and antipathy to “socialism” dominate nearly every conversation I have had or tried to have about the economy. It’s been my experience that most Americans can’t give you an accurate definition of socialism (they tend to confuse it with communism or poison), much less dispassionately discuss its relative merits as an economic option.

Another example is the old fundamentalist habit of attributing systemic problems to the moral failings of individuals. In most discussions of the discussions I have had recently about the sub-prime crisis, people were entirely focused on blaming the borrower, as if it was an epidemic of “personal irresponsibility” that was behind it all, rather than a politically motivated initiative (Bush’s “ownership society”)coupled with clear signals to the industry that they would not be regulated, and the resulting predatory lending and foreclosure practices.

I’m glad you asked this, because I’ve been thinking about it in different terms a lot lately. Personally, I’ve tumbled deep down a rabbit hole of conspiracy-type thinking, and it’s difficult now to see things otherwise.

One person whose work I’ve recently learned about is Richard Hoagland who spent a large part of his career working for CBS News as a NASA/space consultant and now believes that NASA has covered up evidence of structures on the Moon and on Mars that are parallel to the great pyramids in addition to a parallel space program that is well beyond what we commonly know vis a vis the space shuttle, etc.

Anyway, my point in referencing him is twofold. One of his statements is that “the lie is different at every level.” So not only are we deceived at times by journalists or government spokespersons, but they themselves are deceived by their handlers and on up the chain.

The purpose of this deception is control. We probably have the means at hand to end global poverty, for example, but corporations and governments need to subjugate third world nations to maintain a servant/peasant class for cheap labor and to extract their natural resources at a cut rate. If we dealt fairly with these nations, no doubt they’d see a level of wealth that at least provided some reward. Instead there is abject poverty for all but the ruling class (who themselves must kowtow to the first world), and we see TV ads for the Christian Children’s Fund urging us to send a dollar a day to sponsor a child. They lose most obviously, but we first world folks are also deceived (or distracted) in this arrangement by being made to focus our concerns on “the children” and not on the fact that our government is actively creating the conditions that lead to their poverty and squalor.

Hoagland’s other comment that stuck with me is that “peeling back the curtain” is difficult because you’re trying to decode something without the benefit of the key. So you know that something is fishy, but it’s very difficult to articulate with certainty what is up because it is veiled behind many layers of secrecy and/or disinformation.

Another fairly profound quote about science in general:

… society is organized not to advance knowledge, but mainly to protect the status-quo. Nothing wrong with new theories or discoveries as long they can fit within what officially should be the truth at the moment—politically, historically, socially, and above all religiously, proving that despite the fact that we all carry cell-phones and have DVDs our academic/political institutions are still in the same medieval mindset when the laws of the world were dictated by those who thought the earth was the center of the universe.”

“Nowadays, we accept that the earth is not the center of the universe not because it’s true or a scientific fact, but because the people who decide it’s OK for us to be allowed to believe in those facts agree in letting us know. It’s a scientific fact not because it’s real, but because our society evolved into a political system where the gentlemen who make the rules thought there was no conflict with the structure of our reality. It’s all about politics and not about science. Never was about science.”

To answer your questions:

1 & 2. I don’t know who to trust anymore. The best I can do is gather information from a number of different sources and see what the picture looks like. Also, I can filter the information based on the source and that source’s track record of truth-telling.

3. There are some “facts” that I feel certain of (based on 1 & 2). New “facts” are either accepted or rejected based on their relation to my certainties.

4. This is tricky and disconcerting. Trusting one’s intuition is an obvious answer, but now I know that we can be highly suggestable creatures to the extent that it is possible to be manipulated into believing that we really believe something. I also know that we can be guided into supporting a predetermined outcome. It’s tiring, and I don’t know the resolution other than just giving up control.

5. Degrees don’t make a whit of difference if we are not allowed a full range of questions and lines of investigation. “Full range” is determined by one’s level of awareness. As they say, a fish doesn’t know water until it jumps out.

6. Reflexively, I side more with the left in the sense that it’s easier for me to see the evils of the right, but the establishment left is not without it’s own deceptions. You don’t hear Obama calling for 9/11 truth or a repeal of FISA (which he voted for).

7. I follow the raft of “sky is falling” pundits including Naomi Wolf, Naomi Klein, Alex Jones, rawstory.com, and the like as well as certain conspiracy investigators in addition to keeping a finger on the pulse on the mainstream media.

8. I spend way too much time researching this stuff on the Internet and keep going until I reach a satisfactory bottom.

9. I believe a few things with certainty and the rest are “best guesses” that remain open to refinement.

Regarding some of the above discussion, I personally regard the global warming crisis and the economic crisis as con jobs by a global elite who wish to consolidate power. We are being conditioned to accept a tax for our “contribution” to global warming, but never-mind that other planets in our solar system may be warming as well or that the USAF may have successfully weaponized the weather or that the single largest consumer of fossil fuels is the US military. We the people are whipped into a lather by the mainstream media about whether it’s happening or not, why BushCo was so invested in denying it and Gore was so invested in proving that it’s true, when the bigger truth may be that we’ve been egged into a “dialogue” for the purposes of preparing our minds for a new level of control and tithing vis a vis our carbon footprint.

The bailout bill, interestingly, not only transfers a giant sums of money to the rich and famous, but also includes provisions for a carbon tax. One might ask why.

@aidje
No, I don’t mean to blame postmodernism. As you point out, like secular humanism, postmodernism is one of the far-right’s whipping boys. And it is so for good reason. It represents everything that is wrong with the world as they see it—a tolerance of exotic philosophies, lack of respect for authority, and an embrace of uncertainty as a permanent fact of life.

The Right’s objection to postmodernism it is its “moral relativism,” which they see as “anything goes” morality. But this is really a straw man. Postmodernism does not have core values—survival, intellectual integrity through reason, human rights and human dignity—which are perfectly capable of morally orienting the individual and serving as a foundation for ethical behavior. In contrast, the absolutist values of fundamentalism subordinate human survival to apocalyptic struggles between good and evil; they subordinate intellectual integrity and reason to Faith, and they place a higher value on conformity and obedience than they do on human dignity. Indeed, their reliance on scripture opens them up to vagaries of interpretation that are frankly immoral.

That said, postmodernists tend to be self-absorbed and dilettantish. Like the Greek city states, they tend to be quirky and inefficient because they cater to so many fussy sensibilities. From the fascist/fundamentalist point of view it is like the Romans looking on and saying “This is no way to run an empire.” Indeed, the neo-con agenda is to follow the lead of Rome and impose a Pax Americana, by brute force if necessary. Actually, a better example of a postmodern society is the Federation envisioned in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and its exemplar, Jean Luc Picard.

As I see it, there were two basic responses to the crisis within modernity—fascism (fundamentalism) and postmodernism. The fact is, we do live in a postmodern world in which people accept that reality is a matter of perception and that things are not all that they appear. The irony is that people like Carl Rove are able to exploit this sensibility by churning out inauthentic realities based on “spin” (lies that appeal to our prejudicial hatreds). His agenda, however, is not to celebrate the diversity of valid perspectives but to sabotage and discredit them as “political correctness” so that they seem like a disturbing and confusing imposition.

This post makes my brain bleed.

I have to see it to beleive it.

It is definitely a refreshing change from the stuff I usually see here. I’m really enjoying the discussion!

@MontyZuma: With “clear signals to the industry that they would not be regulated” from Alan Greenspan who fnally admitted that his assumption was wrong; that financial institutions WERE NOT best suited to regulate themselves.

@aidje
Oops, what I meant to say was, “Postmodernism does have core values—survival, intellectual integrity through reason, human rights and human dignity.” (etc.)

@ivgr
Deregulation signals were not only from Greenspan, but from the Office of the Comptroller and the SEC, who were each defunded, destaffed and saddled with agency heads who were hostile to regulatory mission of their agencies.

Great answer further above. I have come to trust and believe what I read in The Nation and in the New York Review of Books. One of the things that worries me about this is that many of their journalists are getting on a bit and starting to die—like Molly Ivins. I also find Bill Moyer’s Journal must-viewing for me.

@kevbo
I also like Naomi Klein. I’ve been following Radley Balko on his militarization of the police (“Overkill” available online). Also, the historian Chalmers Johnson has a trilogy of books on the American Empire, the last book of which is called “Nemesis,” in which he describes the hollowing out of our democracy and the concomitant rise of the imperial presidency as being a necessary consequence of our flirtations with Empire—which is an unhealthy society’s tendency to use military force paper over our society’s problems by appropriating the wealth of weaker countries.

This is a subject you can’t even get the “America, love it or leave it” crowd to even acknowledge. According to Chalmers, the CIA and the DEA are the new Praetorian guard, and Guantanamo part of the imperial apparatus of power, the muscle behind the throne. I also recommend Greg Palast’s “Armed Madhouse” as a collection of very important stuff on a par with Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine.”

I’m afraid I also have some simplifying assumptions that help me put a lot of things in clear perspective. Namely, I view religious, economic and political fundamentalism as different aspects of a resurgent fascism. Unfortunately, when you say “fascism” nowadays, most people think of Nazis; they look around and don’t see any swastikas and conclude, ipso facto, that there is no fascism in this country.

Fascism, however, is a much more subtle phenomenon. One of its defining criteria is that it is pro-corporation. So, a corporate state, or a society dominated by corporations would tend to lean toward fascism. Fascism is also a militarist state, which has become centralized into a dictatorial form of government after all the democratic checks and balances have been removed for the sake of command efficiency. This doesn’t happen all at once, so you can have fascist states in various stages of becoming.

Corporations tend to profit from war; hence, the corporate state tends to become a military-industrial-surveillance-propaganda-security-prison complex that instigates wars for profit. In fascism all power resides in the state, not the people; so the state tends to consolidate the power of an aristocratic elite at the expense of the people and democratic values. Individuals have no rights, except those granted to them by the state. The sexual politics of fascism—its hostility to abortion, women’s rights and homosexuality—are all geared toward forcing people to have children who will increase the labor pool and drive down wages, and be economically forced to join the military, where they are treated as expendable.

Fascist states also have a fondness for cliched and shallow thinking, achieved through propaganda and a kind of Orwellian Newspeak. Here religion is one of the vehicles used to strip words of their original complex meanings and replace them with simpler ones. For example, the far right has stripped the word “liberal” of its classical meaning and now uses it as a red flag to indicate a “traitor” or “enemy.”

I find this “logocide” one of the most interesting aspects of fascism, where there is usually a kind of linguistic apartheid that precedes actual apartheid, and a linguistic genocide which precedes actual genocide. The other function of language is to redefine the militarism of the state in apocalyptic religious terms—i.e., in terms of a struggle leading up to a final conflict between “good” and “evil.” This is part of the romance of death which sweeps people up into a patriotic fervor in which the focus on national glory blinds them to the fact that they are sacrificing their lives for the sake of corporate profits.

after reading al that, i guess i truly don’t believe in very much.

@deaddolly
That can be a problem too if large numbers of people don’t trust any source of information well enough to form a definite belief or an opinion they feel strongly enough to care about or defend. They can end up marching to the beat of the loudest drum in the room.

Truly, I do not know what to believe. So, I pronounce myself agnostic. I pray without structure when I feel the need and am trying to take life as it comes, not so much in an unexamined way, but without hard preconceived notions.

I am such a fake. I am full of preconceived notions,but am trying to be aware of them, and make allowance for them in my judgements.

I know I must be the minority in this discussion as a Christian. But please…before you judge me, listen to me.

I happen to agree with alot of what has been said by some of these longer posts. I appreciate the detailed analysis and definitions of “fascism” in particular. That we are a society in transition is very apparent to me.

I do not trust Republican or Democrat candidates or policies. I believe that they are as some say, a distraction to create a dialougue, while the real business of running this country to the next stage of privatized power takes place under this camoflauged specter of progress.

If you look at the political pundits, you can see that it is LEFT against RIGHT. The arguments never stop. To my great surprise, the media does not seem to think it necessary to delve into deeper subjects than political. Even if they do…then they are swamped with multiple levels of distraction, like defining character by association with those of undesirable political persuasion. Such as Ayers, or Rev. Wright.
While these associations truly do represent a form of political and ideological belief, they are merely further examples opposite points of ideological views.

If a reporter got on TV and tried to have a discussion of this caliber to reveal a deeper agenda, they would be laughed out of the media. LEFT or RIGHT would dismiss them as Fundamentalists.

I can see the reasoning behind defining fundamentalism as a facet of fascism, because of the commited beliefs of such as Hitler and his entire following. They were fundamental abotu their beliefs of extermination of an entire race because that race was the “cause” of the “problem”

What’s strange is, we can not seem to define the problem. What is the problem? Is it the Jews? (NO of course not)
I believe the cause of this problem is a fundamental issue with humanity. This flaw of humanity is exhibited by all races. The love of money. THis whole idea of money is power infects humanity from every level of society or nationality. Power is the real issue. People want power. There is power in majority opinion. Convince enough people to go your way and your will control the people and the country and the world. However we have not yet seen a coherent policy of global control yet. It ends up breaking down, because of some strange human trait that rebels against this ultimate control.

I truly believe that there are certain individuals shaping the future they want to shape in a global fashion through financial control. That includes the destruction of markets through practices that destroy entire generations of financial preperation. For example the encouragment by all parties to create sub-prime mortgages and give those packages to so many people knowing that the result will be a huge financial failing. This concept in itself employed in a global market in which the world looks to America as the leader would and has caused the world to follow in the footsteps of AMerica financially in it’s over inflated success and it’s following demise.

Who and how is involved in a master plan beyond our conception and consists of Orwellian principles beyond our imagination as reasonable and kind people.

I take comfort in the faith that I believe supersedes all this nonsense. ANd I truly believe that the world has a destiny that will be fulfilled according to Biblical Prophecy.

So to answer the question. I use my eyes, ears, brain to reason, and faith to trust and verify what is true.

It is a confusing world we live in, indeed.

@watchman220
I applaud you for being so thoughtful. Obviously, it is possible to be a Christian and socially conscious. And what you say about the love of money and power is apt and true, but I think that there are some systems that do better than others in bringing out the best in people, and in restraining the worst.

The problem of power, for example, would seem best solved by democracy, where theoretically everyone has an equal share. Yet, democracies are notoriously difficult to sustain. Likewise the problem of money would seem to be alleviated in a more egalitarian society, like the Swedes. Yet, Americans regard greed as a necessary engine of society, and are consequently loath to place any limitation on it, even though they suffer from predation by the rich.

Does your faith impel you to retreat or engage in the world?

My faith is the fuel of my action. By faith I moved across the country 2000 miles from Arizona to Ohio to get a better job. I personally believe that God called my family and I to Ohio…the rest of you can believe what you want…lol.
But I did not always feel this way or act this way. I long hoped for some ship of bounty to dock on my shore, and make my life easy. But it is not coming in.

I moved to get a good job and work hard to get out of debt. Which was better than what I was doing before…working hard and falling behind in a bad small town economy.

My entire perspective of life and opportunity has changed because I can see all the possibilities that were too good to be true before. I am living it. So considering all this…I have seen and taken action about what I believe. How do I know what to believe? Pursue action and test the waters. This is a personal testimony about what I have believed in my personal life.

But also I should add, in regard to sources of opinion which I use to gauge what is real.
I watch conservative and liberal media channels to see what both sides are saying. The discourse, has been informative in it’s arguments between the two sides, but also informative in the lack of discussion on certain subjects.
To clarify…the arguments are so partisian, that there is a profound dissapointment in this system, because it does not deal with the deeper questions of society.

As you mention…greed might be lessened in a more egalitarian society. A more egalitarian society sounds great in principle and I seriously get what you are saying. But…I think that charity and consideration for the less fortunate is a voluntary action, which should not be legislated. The same way I believe abortion or non-abortion is a voluntary action or choice, which should not be legislated.

Many things in a society can go wrong when a government forces legislation in a certain area. But society really goes wrong when the moral fiber of the majority dissipates into subjective values as in our current post-modern society.

I am so amazed at how subjective people are these days. They say there is no absolute truth…a statement with which I disagree. A statement that in itself proclaims an absolute value. How can anyone know what to believe when truth is subjective.

This is where my faith empowers my action. Because I can see personal events in my life that verify the existence of a personal and intimate presence of God. I can not demonstrate through science this experience for you or anyone else. So in some regards I am also seen as a subjective believer.

All this to say that no belief system can answer all the questions or explain all the mysteries of this existence.
Empirical data from scientific observation can only take us so far. Faith can only be employed in addition to empirical evidence not in the place of empirical evidence.

The combination of faith and evidence creates for me a coherent picture of reality that I can navigate with confidence. My faith addresses the needs of those in poverty. Giving and giving cheerfully is a tenet of my faith.

Additionaly there are other imbalances in these more egalitarian societies. I have a friend who lives in the netherlands where Marijuana is legal, as well as prostitution. This introduces a different subset of societal problems including disease and addiction. Not like we don’t have that as well in USA…but it seems like more of a problem in the Netherlands because of what they have allowed.

You can’t fix human nature. It’s what makes us human. If we fixed it, we would be robots.
I am not in favor of greed. But I don’t think we can fix it with government.

It’s totally possible to be a Christian and to be socially conscious. The first Christians were like that. I remember reading somewhere that just to join the early Christian community, you had to sell or give away pretty much all of your possessions, and donate any proceeds to the Church or the poor. When I think about the selflessness and caring that they exhibited back then, it makes the modern Church look greedy and vicious.

I always wondered when things changed for them and you could belong without giving everything away. That’s a topic for another time, though.

I just finished watching a 2 hour Frontline briefing on US energy policy. One of the things mentioned in passing was that the Oil companies—specifically Exxon—gave money to two institutes to deny the scientific evidence in favor of global warming. They’ve stopped doing it, but the damage has been done. A lot of people no longer believe that the existing science is credible. And this provides sufficient cover for the President and other anti-environmentalists to drag their feet on doing anything about global warming.

I listen very closely to what Billy Graham and Pat Robertson say. Then I can assume the opposite because they have never been correct in anything that required intellect and understanding.