My understanding of my thought process and my perception of others’ thought processes is that somehow we respond the same to beliefs and to facts. As humans we go as far as waging wars for “right” causes because we can confuse what we believe with what we know. I am training myself to separate the two and as a result I find that I am relating in much better ways to everyone in my life.

With regards to your first point. I agree. Even if mass and collective opinion have the same idea about something it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is truth. It makes it probable and likely but never reality.

When I talk about reality I’m talking relatively loosely. I’m talking more about opinions and the way we see things. Things like religion, war, political opinion, goals, vision and all of these more fluid concepts.

As for scientific fact and knowledge about atoms or the stars or planets. For example we can safely say that the sun is 90 million miles from the earth. That is fact and is accepted and is based on sound evidence and can easily be proved and replicated. A scientist saying there is no God, is only based on his or her beliefs.

Thanks for sharing.

I’d like to add a couple of my thoughts. First, I agree that our perceptions stem from our beliefs. As we challenge and change our beliefs, our perceptions also change. However, it is important to keep in mind what a belief is. A belief is something that we choose to accept as being true. But believing in something does not make it true even if everyone were to agree. On that basis, can one really say there reality? Is like the story of the six blind men and the elephant. For the sake of applying a label, I would agree with the comment that reality can be a form of a collective perception.

My second comment is that just as we need to distinguish between perceptions and reality we also should make a distintion between what is factual and what is true. Facts are the basis of what we know: what can be proven to be so. Truth however stands alone. It simply is. It cannot be proven nor disproven.

Actually I’m inclined to agree with you. I believer there is a very simple absolute truth and that it is the bedrock upon which perception is built and changes according to our own version of it. I hope that makes sense!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this – my answer is that I do believe there are absolute truths – but those truths are related to the composition of matter, structure of how chemicals react, etc… As for human behavior, I don’t think there is any absolute truth because there are so many unique perceptions, situations, circumstances, and just plain sheer number of variables involved. If there is a reality of human behavior fully and completely understood by anyone or anything in the universe, I’d reckon it’d be a 1 x 10^1000000000000000 volume of books, each thousands of pages long
New at Jeremy Johnson’s blog ..Introducing The First Wizard, Lisa Irby

If that’s what you choose to believe, the so be it. Does that belief serve you?