Does it Really Matter What Someone Believes?
Our personal beliefs play an enormous role in how we view our lives. The manner in which we perceive our successes and our failures is dependent upon the framework of our beliefs. How we interpret events, how we respond to new ideas and how we react to the people around us are all influenced or even guided by our system of beliefs.
Through the window of our beliefs we try to make sense of the world around us and once established, beliefs are accepted as facts and are rarely subjected to examination. They become, Jonathan Wells says, our “personal operating system.” Much like the operating system on a computer, our beliefs control how we sort and file every bit of input data.
Everything we see, experience, think or feel is adjusted to fit within the confines of our own system of personal beliefs. In other words, our version of reality is a creation of our beliefs. Our personal operating system disassembles and reassembles all input data to conform to what we believe.
This is not a conscious process. Many of our beliefs were established during childhood and have outlived their usefulness. Others are leftovers from situations and circumstances that are no longer relevant. Yet some remain sound.
Why is this important? Imagine attempting to run one of the latest video games on an old gaming console. If you could get the game to load at all, it wouldn’t run very soomthly, it would probably drop new features and the graphics would be messed up. The same could be said of obsolete belief systems that are still influencing how we evaluate everything in our lives.
I want to shine a light on some of those old belief systems, and a few new ones, to see if they stand up to scrutiny. If you dare to read – I’ll dare to write. Just click on the category, What We Believe, or Not.
Sketches on the way 