Apparently....

Apparently, this new attempt at proactivity is making me want to write tiny little blurbs with no real point to them. I suppose this is a stepping stone to the more substantial stuff I have burbling around in there...without putting these out there, I'll have to weed through these snippets of crap to get at any kind of real idea.

Since about three people read this on a good day, I'll ask for your kind indulgence.

I'm struggling with the power of belief and the instability of knowledge.  I'm reading some philosophy that I haven't touched in awhile, and I'd forgotten that one of my biggest issues with the field of philosophy is the tendency is this reliance on the concept of a deity as a foundation for justified belief.

Seriously?  You're going to tell me that I can't trust my senses about the couch I'm sitting on, but I'm supposed to absolutely  trust that there is a Supreme Being that enables all things to exist?

Ok, it's fine in the context of a philosophical discussion about a table, but the problem is that this kind of thinking permeates very real conversations about very real issues that have a very...real...effects on very...real...people.  That it's an accepted form of philosophical argument is troubling because I honestly think it lends intellectual weight to using the Deity concept as a fundamental argument. (Hell, if Descartes could do it....)  It allows us, in a way, to dissociate ourselves from our beliefs, placing their basis on some unseen Other instead of really picking apart all of the experiences and thoughts and information that has actually gone into our embracing of one concept over another.

I suppose that, in a way, this somewhat more analytical approach leaves us more vulnerable to more compelling arguments, but then...why is that a bad thing?  Why do we feel that we have to be married to one idea or set of ideas for a life time?  Is it better to stubbornly hold onto beliefs with no real foundation, simply because we can take comfort in them?

I don't know.

This is somehow an integral part of what will hopefully become a masters/doctoral thesis, but I can't figure out quite what it is. Is it philosophy?  Psychology?  Sociology?  Cog Sci?  Something completely different?  And if so...what the hell is it?  And how do I put it together so it's a) something that people will want to read and b) that they will be able to use it to make this shitshow of a world better?