cannot be true. So let us see why what I called aggregate relevance is
such an important feature.ACCOMMODATING AIRY NOTHING:
A MATTER OF UNDUE LAXITY?People who ask questions like "How can one believe that... ?" are of
course not among the believers. It is a hallmark of genuine belief that
we generally care little for its origin, for the ways in which it became
a denizen of our mental household. For instance, most of us believe [299]
that salt is white and steel is tough, but we do not generally know
how we acquired these beliefs; nor do we care. Asking where beliefs
come from, in the context of religion, has generally been the preoccu-
pation of skeptics. This does not invalidate the question—far from
it—but may explain why it is generally answered in a particular way
that I find insufficient and actually misleading.
It does not require much effort to have religious beliefs. The Fang
people who insist that there are witches flying about on banana leaves,
like the Christians who assume that a hugely powerful agent is watch-
ing them, do not in general need to work hard to persuade themselves
of such claims. Which is why only skeptics tend to see belief as a form
of mental negligence. People are said to believe in supernatural agents
because they are superstitious, they are led astray by their emotions,
they are not mentally balanced, they are primitive, they do not under-
stand probability, they are not scientifically trained, they are brain-
washed by their culture, they are too insecure to challenge received
wisdom. In this view, people believe because they fail to (or forget to,
have no time to, are unwilling to, or just cannot) censure ill-formed or
poorly justified thoughts. The beliefs would vanish if people were
more consistent in applying commonsense principles of mental man-
agement like the following:
Only allow clear and precise thoughts to enter your mind.
Only allow consistent thoughts.
Consider the evidence for a claim before accepting it.
Only consider refutable claims.What people say about the Fang ghosts seems unclear at the very
junctures where precision would be essential. People say that the ghosts
WHYBELIEF?