As an atheist, one of the constant lines that you hear from someone new you meet is that I have my own belief system but I respect anyone’s belief or faith. The polite and socially acceptable answer to the same is that I also agree to it. However, I have to constantly keep testing this. How can I respect a belief system where the person who believes it is also blindly following it and then also expects the same from me.
Amongst us are people who live in an age of blind faith and ignorance. Their faith system is so weak that they themselves are scared to test it. Imagine the level of deceit a person must be living to believe in something that they themselves fear to test it. The level of conditioning of mind to be able to completely ignore any evidence contrary to your belief system and holding the belief system so tightly that even a slightest nudge to it, not only breaks the belief system but also ends up breaking the person itself. Such is the pressure on oneself in current times that they need the belief system to be true and anything otherwise will shatter them.
Around you the world is behaving in so many ways that we fail to make any sense of it. In such a stage, you need something to hold on to. For some, it might be their political belief system. For others, it might be their religious belief system. A unknown belief that in the chaos around us, there is some force, even though invisible that is probably making sense of the chaos. Nowhere can we even comprehend that maybe such a force does not exist. That what we see around is our own doing and we need to take control of it and only we can try to make a sense out of it.
Our systems around have failed us so miserably that we cannot any longer trust a human without knowing whether they adhere to the same belief system that we have. Any slight digression from it and we tend to alienate the person from our life as we know it would lead to uncomfortable situations where we may end up questioning our own belief systems.
How can someone settle in such a system? Can you raise a question in such times where an individual cannot even answer and can only contribute to the noise that the crowd is able to make? Everyone is thinking that by following the group of their belief system, they are able to chant a beautiful hymn, creating that peaceful symphony while all they are doing is making noise which neither anyone understands, nor they want someone to understand.
Hence, no I do not respect your belief system, I would love to discuss it, learn from it, understand what you have understood based on your experience and why you continue to believe it.
