HUMAN BELIEFS

Belief and its definition

I am sure that all people in this world have their own beliefs. Thus, this makes human beliefs have variations. There are a lot of things that we can talk about belief because of these variations. For example, we can talk about kinds of humans’ beliefs, the history of human beliefs, and the effect of having beliefs. But, people have to understand the definition of ‘belief’ first, before talk about it deeper.
Most people define the term belief as a mental state of mind. According to Wikipedia, the definition of belief is also similar with the definition that most people have:

“Belief is the psychological state which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.”

For me, the definition of belief that written in Wikipedia is quite broad that I can put all kinds of belief into it.

Kinds of belief

There are some kinds of humans’ beliefs that I can classify in this paper based on some articles that I have read when I made reports for my reading assignments. I classify them according to their background and their logical way of thinking.

1. Background history

According to their background history, I classify human beliefs as traditional beliefs and modern beliefs.

• Traditional beliefs

Human beliefs that I classify into this group are animism, dynamism, spiritualism. It is because these beliefs have already been existed since the beginning of human history. Our ancestor had followed these beliefs.

• Modern beliefs

Nowadays religions are the example of these beliefs. Actually, they are the continuation of traditional beliefs. People adopted the traditional beliefs into these beliefs and they make a certain rule for each belief in order to make people’s live peacefully. As the example of religions are Catholic, Protestant, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and many other religions.

2. Logical way of thinking

Here, I classify beliefs according to their acceptability in human’s logical thinking. I categorized them into:

• Agnosticism

This belief is followed by people who do not believe of something that is out of people’s logical points of view. This belief usually becomes the opposite of religious point of view. The concepts which included to this kind of belief are nihilism, and atheism.

• Scientific beliefs

These beliefs usually have connection with all the possibilities happen in human being. It is tend to be related to science development. For example, people believe that the theory of heliocentric is true because it have already been proven by the scientist.

The effects of having certain belief

What people think about their own beliefs may cause misunderstanding. For example, people who think that their beliefs are the most acceptable will force their beliefs to others. These meant human beliefs may cause ‘exclusive’ feeling to their followers. Imagine if all people have such point of view, there will be a war between them. Or, at least, they will just underestimate other followers and they will start to hurt others’ feelings.

Suggestion

It is good for people to have beliefs, as long as they can be more flexible to accept other beliefs and its characteristics, in order to avoid misunderstanding and the disunity.



References
Belief. Wikipedia. Retrieved March 25, 2010, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief


By : Elisabeth Christya Novi Argarini
(081214121)