Suggested exercises for belief weaklings

Following on from my conversation with my friend and fellow blogger @Wordy. I'd like to pose the question: Are we handicapped by our inability to believe in truth, handicapped by herd instinct, peer pressure and the media? Why is so difficult to believe in some phenomena for which there is evidence. Some people don't even believe AIDs exists but label it an overall deterioration of the immune system.

Sez @Wordy, possibly proving my point.

Climate change? Pollution and noxious emissions of various sorts are clearly playing a large part, but I don't know that anyone is in a position to say with absolute certainty what proportion of the change is man-made rather than cyclical (i.e., naturally occurring).

But then Wordy goes on to say we have to do something about climate change, no matter what.


It would seem that many of us have weak belief muscles. Few believed that house prices would fall and that there would be a financial crisis, but they did and it did. Not enough people believe and then act on the belief that human beings have caused global warming, and yet global warming is a reality.

The ability to believe tangible oncoming catastrophe is a very useful one for those who would like to survive catastrophe. One day, it’s possible, an undetected meteorite or comet might hit the earth and wipe out all human life on it including the Guardian. Is this why the Guardian published a piece by Lembit Öpik calling for a space defence system. Most of us aren’t that worried, but the danger is real.

Some people go further. Gary McKinnon, who has lost his case will now probably be extradited to the USA to serve a 60 year life term in a US jail for believing in the testimony of the 400 apparently highly reliable witnesses in project Disclosure and acting on that belief. After hacking into hundreds of US NASA and US military PCs he proved, to his own satisfaction at least, that UFOs and aliens exist and that there really is a source of cheap, clean energy being hidden from the general public by the military industrial complex. Gary McKinnon is a Charles Atlas when it comes to belief.

But how good are you at believing seemingly impossible things?

Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things.""I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Alice in Wonderland.

Consider that in some cases your survival or at least your financial security might depend on it. I am reading the war letters of my family. My grandfather, an Austrian Jew, believed that the Nazi’s would persecute the Jews and that war would break out so he took a boat from Dover to Lorenzo Marques two months before the war the trouble really started. His sister did not, returned to Paris from London and was picked up off the streets and sent to Drancy (a French internment and later concentration camp for Jews) and then on to Auschwitz in shipment 27 on 02/09/1942, where she was gassed on arrival.

There is a logical fallacy whereby something terrible (or perhaps wonderful) cannot be true or will not happen merely because it has not happened before in human memory – or perhaps because we have no experience of it. It only takes one incident to demonstrate that that terrible thing can indeed happen and will.

Here are some exercises I suggest for belief weaklings.

Weeks 1 - 2: Consider the possibility that IFOs might exist.
Weeks 3 - 4: Entertain the belief that IFOs might exist.
Weeks 5 - 6: Take into consideration that IFOs might exist.
Weeks 7 - 8: Come to terms with the possibility that IFOs exist.
Weeks 9 - 10: Take a little leap of faith: For you IFOs now exist.