I don't want to ask the same old questions: Why do religious people profess goodness, practice hate? Why do people of varying religions not see their communality instead of their differences? Why do people believing in God take so much of life and death into their own hands?
I guess what I would like to know is what makes some people capable of belief, others not. How do so many people believe such ludicrous stories; what makes the legends of the Bible, the accounts of the Koran, more respectable than the stories of Achilles and Zeus, Cupid and Athena? How, in this age of reason, does faith persist? I don't mean "Why does faith persist?" but "How?"
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I've been doing some in depth study on the history of Fables. I think that the most important thing I've learned is that some knowledge is most easily gained through 'narrative' (plot and characters moving through conflict to resolution)... one book I found called Faith and Narrative says "one can "live in" a text by way of being a component of a world to which the text refers; one can do so by way of being part of a community that early in its historical career defined by a text and continues to define itself by reference to that text- one's person and actions continue a narrative one neither began nor defines; one can do so by attempting to live in conformity to a pattern that is articulated textually.
...assuming that it is necessary to discriminatingly live within any text that provides us a dwelling, what are the proper parameteres of such discrimination?"
I know it's not the most libertine of understandings, but I think that the philosophical outline is very insightful to how belief survives and particularly on what level intellectually people make the choice to "Believe".
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