Why Do People Believe?

In this video we explore the complex world of "belief" and present one perspective on the subject, taken primarily from scholar Abby Day's book "Believing in belonging".

Sources:
Day, Abby (2013). "Believing in Belonging: Belief and Social Identity in The Modern World. Oxford University Press.

#Religion #Faith #Sociology

[irwincrook]

This guy produces Gems and Diamonds and gets spare change as views

[nadiyaibrahim]

Thank you for the video Filip. As usual, the content is rich and interesting. I think the same study would have produced very similar results if conducted in Lebanon. I am not sure about other Middle Eastern countries, but at least for Lebanon I can tell that a large proportion of the population “Believe in Belonging”. There are factors specific to this country that enforce this type of belief, mainly the highly sectarian system of governance that runs deep in Lebanon’s history since the 1940s, producing societies divided across religious and sectarian lines. Memories of the 17-year Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), and which was partly triggered by religious reasons, are still fresh in the minds of Lebanese, making it difficult to bring sectarianism to an end. In this context, identifying with a religious sect is essential to attaining a sense of safety and security among other things. I tried to make the long story short, but the context is of course much more complex than this.
Thank you :)

[brb]

As I listened, I thought about the Muslim countries in which I have lived and worked on and off for the past 20+ years. "Belief in belonging" applies very much to the UAE, where I lived for four years. Their performative acts necessarily included going to the masjid to pray, especially on Fridays, and fasting during Ramadan, but as I listened to local people talk about their religion, it occurred to me that their belief revolved around, and very much depended on, social relationships among family and tribe. Right and wrong depended on the recipient of an act: An act that would be wrong because it was directed at another local citizen may not be wrong when directed at a foreigner, especially if the foreigner was of lower social status such as being from the sub-continent.

[balanceinsight]

I would find it so interesting for this same study to be carried out in India, a place whose spirituality is so often romanticised in the western world. I wonder if it would produce similar results. Who knows!

[jonnyholmberg]

Brilliant. Research-based, intellectually trustworthy, well said. Thank you.

[DamienZshadow]

As someone who left their religion of birth, I do find it so bizarre that not enough people question what they were raised up on and simply based their belief on such things like community rather than what they personally believe.

[waynedombrowski]

"Faith is as necessary to human beings as food and water." Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted. Etymology can offer insight. "Religion" is derived from the Latin word meaning "to bind together". Through the Evolution lens, it could be argued that we have a genetic predisposotion for religiosity.

[KirurUwU]

Interesting research. What I thought while watching is what you have pointed out at the end, that the results might be very different in other places. The studies can only tell us something about people in a secular society where people largely identify as Christian. I am inclined to think that there are some similarities in other places, but also significant differences.

However, more important for me are actually people who exactly don't identify with the religion of the majority of the people in their environment. There are also many degrees of that, as such a person could still believe with their family in a religion in a country they are foreigners to, but also a person might believe in a religion completely different to their place and family altogether. There are also various degrees inbetween. I'm somewhere there. It's just that there are also many reasons beyond social belonging or beyond other more purely psychological reasons. People philosophizing about their beliefs can be very interesting. It might not be intended by the research, but unfortunately, such social explanations are often abused and generalized by some people to portray others as irrational for having certain beliefs. Such arguments can be in themselves quite the leaps.

[delphinidin]

wow, this is interesting. i think part of the reason it's so interesting to me is that while i can see that this "belonging" aspect is the most important to many if not most people, it is not at all what i think of as religion, nor what i was raised (in American Evangelicalism) to think of religion. my churches always taught that believing was the most important part and that if you only performed religion for outward show that it really wasn't your religion at all. obviously, this was not a sociological judgment, but an ideological one, but still... for me, the sociological view feels really foreign to my understanding of religion!

[thomashammel]

Thank you very much for this content! Those are questions that have been at the center of my thoughts for a while and you express some vague feelings I had in a very articulate way, this should help me a lot - keep posting, I'll keep watching! ^^

[asteroidalassassin]

This really showed me how irreligious most people are. It's all just a ceremony to them.

[NipplesOfDestiny]

Honestly, my parents forced me into it. We never believed, it felt like we were just keeping up appearances

[w.loczykij]

In my opinion Dr Day's conclusion as to why people believe still pertain only to what we "get" out of religion (benefits) and not to "causes" of human - as only humans are religious - religiosity (why).

Belief (later religion) comes from innate understanding, however imprecise, that the reality has a cause. Complexity of this still unresolved question makes us quite humanely oversimplify the issue by establishing some superiour ruler. And as with all human rulers we then devise the system of accessing and/or bribing their benevolence. This then is the religion.
Group cohesion, civilization building etc is the result of having a religion.
That's briefly all. X

[madoo]

Believing is something personal and related to the nature, there is that correlation between the creatures that pushes you to believe. belonging is something you find it in yourself since your birth, you don't choose it, it's also natural, I believe...all those bring to the diversity of the oneness, humanity!!

[brunomicali]

One thing that came to my mind was the qualitative differences between passive believing and deliberative believing, by that I mean believing because one thought about it's religion and its premisses against believing because one was thought to believe. I thing those things are different since everybody lives with believes that we took as facts without analysing it because we were told things were like this.

[ricardofranciszayas]

This channel is wonderful! Please define “Belief.”

[Zyad]

I think the same aspects are at play everywhere, but the ratios and emphasis is what differs. For example in Egypt here it is more a lot more about social responsibility of who resulted in the current state of affairs, but for the most part they won't mind a foreign atheist for example. Thus the sociological and geopolitical situation plays the most part in which factor people use more than the other to relate to religion or "the right way" of "the" religion.

[reemash]

Would love if a similar study was performed across the globe and compared

[iuliaforje]

How would social belonging be explained in people that convert to another religion, maybe even against their family's/kin's wishes? Would they then be attracted to join another social group? Are there any theories that claim that religion is about self-enquiry?

[Pure_Light_of_Gnosis]

There are two kinds of people in religion those who see and those who follow those who see. One has direct mystical experience, the other simply follows them or belongs to religion for some sense of belonging. This is most people