What is Belief?

“Our cognitive life is not limited to clear, fully conceptualized, articulated beliefs. Instead, beliefs
constitute only a small illuminated portion of that life. The greater portion is a rather dark, cognitive set,
an unarticulated work for interpreting our world, which if articulated, would be an enormous network of
claims not all of which would be accepted by the individual as his beliefs. (Calhoun Cheshire, 1984, 338)

Belief or “belief systems” are value systems, ideas or convictions which operate within the human
mental and psyche, manifesting particular behaviors and being regarded along with the ritual, as the
gathering place of all religions. When exploring the genesis of belief we encounter a world of symbols, of
millenary mental archetypes, of unconscious performances. Tracing its roots requires a profound both
rational and intuitive merge into a sensitive world of interrelated concepts. Belief is the centre of
religions as ego is the centre of our consciousness and both the religions and consciousness operate
within the same sets of archetypes in the human psychological realm. Jung describes archetypes as
initially empty forms and that “when activated they become a powerful force in the life and behavior of
the individual” ; so we can extract the argument that religions animate and empowers belief into human
being’s mind, exactly through these sets of mysterious images. (Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious, p.48). Whether religion is a fabricated motif to substitute our ancient ritualistic behavior
will be elucidated when the concept of belief and all the influences that gravitate around it will be
thoroughly analyzed.

On researching a path and a modus operandi to discover the meanings and origins of belief, Luhrmann
for example rejects psychology to anthropology’s “theoretical freedom”, as the latter works with
instruments as cultural differences, ethnography or fieldwork experience. Thus, she states “the basic
challenge is to describe what is experienced, how is interpreted and how is rationalized”. (Luhrmann,
Persuasions of the Witches Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, Chapter 23, p.386). Rather
than a linear rationale, she draws a spherical model in which the concept of belief emerges from the
ritual and pointed central and absolute, the mind, the conscious.

E. B. Taylor, a fine observer of human culture, emphasized two great laws which influence his later
opinion on religious belief: the psychic unity, uniformity of the human race, the motif of “one mind”,
and the “pattern of intellectual evolution “in time. The uniformity of the mind unites the human race
and evolution is marked by two major accomplishments: the developing of the language through the
mimic of the sounds of the nature and the discovery of mathematics through the counting system based
in fingers and toes. His first observation, that language is a radical element of the human culture,
mythology and belief is analogous to Max Muller’s “nomina” (name), which later converted into
”numina” (gods), a linguistic observation which asserts that words originally meant to describe nature,
but degenerated into stories, mythologies and belief. Taylor traces the origins of the religious belief in
the mind of the “savage philosopher”, and affirms that it becomes social gradually through sharing of
the same views. Even in the modern society, “in the stream of social evolution”, superstitions for
example survive as “historical cultural leftovers”. In a different tone, the intellectualist Emile Durkheim
states that beliefs are the “speculative side” of religion and that “they change from religion to religion
and even from age to age in the same religion […] But the need for ceremonies always remains; they are
the true source of social unity, and in every society they are the real ties that bind. They disclose the
true meaning of religion.”(Daniel L. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, p.114). Between society and belief,
he reduces belief and religion as being always indisputable determined and controlled by society, a view
shared by Sigmund Freud “Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases
our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as
the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to
view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably
come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the
rational operation of the intellect."