reflecting upon this, I think lunamoth spoke in a sense for myself, when he spoke of the influence of his parents. My own had no particular "belief" as such that they attempted to instill in me, yet I realise now how their always obvious love for me has given me what I have always valued and known as a fundamental trust in "reality", the instinct that we live in a cosmos and not a chaos. This in spite of the fact that, having a weak mind easily influenced by those whose "beliefs" are strong and unyielding, such trust has often been punctured, yet always recovered. Seeing the questions of Chris I feel in a quandary.................how to "begin" to believe, to trust, if such is not an instinctive sense of your being. Once again my NT is rusty, yet I do remember some words like "even the devils believe, and tremble", which appear to point to the reality that mere "belief" needs further supplements to issue in that which is positive, both for oneself and others. And reflecting upon this, the words of Baudelaire come to mind.........It is more difficult to love God than to believe in him There seems to me to be a great difference between those who "love God" and those who merely "believe" in Him, so much so that often the belief of some "Godfearers" quite frankly makes the pee run down my legs (as I remember someone on another forum saying!) I just appear to be rabbiting on, yet I think of one of the tales of Nasruddin, the one where he is found looking for a key beneath the light of a street lamp. He seeks it there, not because this was where he actually dropped it, but because here there was more light............This seems to relate to all our conditioning, biological or psychological, all the "drives, conventions, patterns, and habits that urge us to follow the most familiar course of action irrespective of how inappropriate or destructive it might be" (Batchelor) Its relevance seems to be that we can all get caught up in such drives, never seeking beyond, locked up within an iron sense of "self" that understands itself as independent and permanent. And for me, it is fear, the opposite of true trust/faith, that keeps us caged. In many ways "belief" is the polar opposite of genuine trust, which to me is more a "letting go". (Belief being a "clinging to") Who and what are we really? Stephen Batchelor suggests that perhaps we shall never know, yet the alternative to this potentially creative unknowing is to freeze ourselves inside rigid definitions of self that I have already referred to. So perhaps to "believe" in the sense demanded by the original quote calls more for a release of "belief", to begin looking at our chains. "Deconstruction" indeed! And maybe when the "beliefs" we already have are gone, we shall open the way to the "love of God", which in a sense is all that matters.
