I spent a good deal of time as a teenager trying to fathom out why people believed what they believed and how they came to those beliefs. Really I suppose trying to understand what thinking was about. At university I spent some time working out what truth in language is, (something to do with meaning) and what religious philosophy was all about. Sounds grand but basically boils down to ‘You think what? Why?’ – in bold and capitals depending on how astonished one is.
The real question is why do people believe different things? Its a fascinating journey through culture, derived wisdom, education, ignorance and the chaos that is life. We have developed a science because we are not given any answers (we had divine holy writ given too because we needed answers and guidance), and the main conclusion is that the brain is trying to understand the Universe and what do you know, it can be understood. Isn’t that amazing?
I do subscribe to the description that people believe what they want to believe, and there is a huge underlying psychology to how we use our brains and how rigorous or not we are about discerning value in what we learn. We can keep an antique because it becomes more and more valuable but an old idea can become more and more worthless. The idea that women are second class citizens is one such. There are many more.
Whenever I hear people espousing facts I am more interested in their psychology than in what they are actually saying, because who they are is not in what they say but in why they say it.
Which is true of my musings as well.