Seeing Conditions What We Believe
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When a closer look is taken at the working of human nature, we begin to notice a reoccurring pattern. Whereas faith is often constructed based on a persons initial perception of a situation, it is this faith that, once finalized, goes on to limit perception of new situations, therefore resulting in a downward spiral of limited understanding. Many prominent examples of this gradual digression have presented themselves throughout history providing as support to the general statement Ðseeing conditions what we believe: believing conditions what we see which I will discuss.
The majority of human opinion of Ðbelief is formulated based on personal experience to which we apply our own understanding. Generally, human creativity appears to be limited to facts that relate to information we have been told. For instance, when trying to create and image of an extra terrestrial life form, though we know that it is quite possible that it would not resemble a human in any way, our imagination of such a creature is still limited so as to include humanistic attributes. Therefore, based on this example and the idea it portrays, we can validly state that we base our ideas, or beliefs, on things we experience; or rather, see. With this idea stated, we can now examine some supporting examples where something we see affects our belief, a practice that is often referred to as generalization. The devastation that occurred on September 11th, 2001 in New York City is a widely known incident. Many people stood by and watched as the two planes crashed into the world trade center in riveting seriatim and countless more stood by their televisions to witness this atrocity. It was not long before the message was out: the people responsible for this atrocity were suicide bombers from an afghani terrorist group. How has this affected our perception of people from Afghanistan? Racial profiling directed to people of the Muslim race, even people of darker skin, are stopped and more thoroughly checked in airports as called for due to Ðheightened security. In the few years directly following the Ð911 tragedy people of the Muslim race faced a vast amount of racial profiling not only in airports, but in all aspects of life. Often they were immediately perceived as a Ðpotential terrorist or a Ðpotential suicide bomber simply because the world took witness to the terrorist actions of one specific group who happened to be from that same part of the world. Parallel to this example, we see that the same situation occurred in the genocide in German under Nazi rule in the mid 1900s. This tragedy was allowed to occur largely because of an epidemic of blinded belief and a staggering generalization: ÐJews are dirt; evil. They murdered Jesus Christ and so they do not deserve to live. The tragic thing about this is, that the people who believed this were not necessarily bad people. It was instead the idea, based on historical assumptions that led these honest people to truly believe that people of the Jewish religion were impure, and therefore not Ðworthy of human status. It was by this terrifying, widespread misconception that the terrors of the Holocaust were allowed to prevail. Someone made this bold assumption, based on their perception of historical facts and began to believe in this dangerous generalization, spreading this belief throughout the continent and the world.
Understanding that explained above, we may now go on to consider the fact that, if perception affects belief, belief must therefore affect perception. Belief is defined as “Mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something” (