Reflection for the Week–November 4

People often say, “If I was born somewhere else, I would believe something else.” This implies that context is determinative for belief. While there is a degree of truth to this, it is a reductionistic subterfuge. Context does play a role in belief, but so do many other features of being in the world. Things are really much more complex, when it comes to belief. Surely, we in the West are more prone to illegitimate context transfer. That is, we desire to suspend belief because it might be different if we were in another context. This is a charade. To imagine that we were born somewhere else would mean to imagine that we are not who we are. We might attempt this, but we will never escape ourselves. Dealing with the matters of the context we are actually living in the midst of, therefore, will be the appropriate trajectory for coming to grips with legitimate belief.