by Stephen Noble
The need for belief in the idea of god is tantamount to avoiding the search for truth. A person may truly believe, but that which is believed is not necessarily true. These types should remember that their hero said, "The truth shall set you free." Not, "What you believe is true..." What a person believes only sanctions their feeling good. In this sense, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus all believe the same thing: only that which makes them feel good. (You heard it here first.) What a person believes is strictly subjective, for example: One man's kingdom is another man's exile. And, of course, herein lies the problem.
Self-serving, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, audacious, and foremost, sequacious, the religious zealot is possessed of a pervasive and common mindset characterized by undereducated, undisciplined, and wholly dependent mental qualities/abilities. With these types, rationalism trumps empiricism. Why don't we believe Aristotle when he posited his geocentric view of the universe? Simple intelligent objective observation. Copernicus recognized this and had the good sense to keep his yap shut, lest he fall victim to the stranglehold the Vatican had on burgeoning science at the time.
Half a millennium ago, religious zealots burned heretics via-autos-de-fe. Now, religious zealots use plastic explosives in their neo-autos-de-fe. In America, zealots have yet to resort to C-4, but remain mentally crippled and so are blind and deaf to openmindedness.
For these types, belief is methodology.