Reflection On Personal Beliefs

Decent Essays
Beliefs are instilled in us by the community, the culture, and the people (family, friends, superiors) surrounding us. Being able to go beyond these notions introduced to us at an age where we are not able to rationalize concepts on our own is what begins to shape our personal beliefs. Generally, beliefs should not be accepted or denied in accordance with the person who presents us with them, for we should engage in further inspection to decide whether these are valid. However, in certain instances, we do not have the authority or capability to challenge beliefs, to be more specific, those established in the natural sciences and mathematics. Aside from these two particular areas of knowledge, we as individuals should always question beliefs …show more content…
The area of knowledge called ethics helps us decide which beliefs are consistent with our moral values, allowing us to refute any that are not. Ethics also challenges us to use our judgment and put it in to practice when we come across a specific situation, giving us an accurate perspective of the world or of a certain belief. As a child, I was raised in a Roman Catholic home and taught to hold beliefs affiliated with Catholicism. However, as I grew up and began forming beliefs and values of my own, I realized that Catholicism grasped on to certain ideals that I did not agree with, for example, the belief that God does not accept homosexuals. Aside from my personal opinions on homosexuality, Catholics emphasize that God loves all his children, so what partitions homosexuals from this claim? “Though we cannot have certain demonstrations of everything, still we must take sides, and in matters of custom, embrace opinions that seem the most probable, so we may never be irresolute when we need to act” (Descartes). Inconsistencies in claims of one belief cause improbability of certainty, and the fact that a group of individuals is excluded from something based on poorly supported claims is immoral. These poorly asserted claims are why I made the decision to abandon …show more content…
“Nothing can count as a reason for a belief except another belief” (Davidson). Reason, as a way of knowing, measures the certainty of beliefs through the formation of consistent parallels with beliefs that are already considered valid. An easy example of this is: if a student believes they will pass a science exam, it is because this student believes that they have studied well for the exam and they believe they are competent in this subject. The competency in the subject is measured by their grade in that class, making it a valid belief. Since this belief coheres rationally with the other two beliefs the student has, they can argue that those beliefs are just as valid as the one about competency. Rationalism also applies to being able to recognize contradictions held in one belief, to identify its uncertainty and eliminate it from our pool of personal beliefs. In order to properly dispose of defective beliefs we must be able to look at things from multiple perspectives and comparing all these perspective to, once again, measure coherency. Although reason (and coherence) effectively determines the certitude of beliefs, we must go beyond this way of knowing to guarantee the appropriate justification of

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