"Seeing Conditions What We Believe

When a closer look is taken at the working of human nature, we begin to notice a reoccurring pattern. Whereas faith is often constructed based on a person's initial perception of a situation, it is this faith that, once finalized, goes on to limit perception of new situations, therefore resulting in a downward spiral of limited understanding. Many prominent examples of this gradual digression have presented themselves throughout history providing as support to the general statement ‘seeing conditions what we believe: believing conditions what we see' which I will discuss.

The majority of human opinion of ‘belief' is formulated based on personal experience to which we apply our own understanding. Generally, human creativity appears to be limited to facts that relate to information we have been told. For instance, when trying to create and image of an extra terrestrial life form, though we know that it is quite possible that it would not resemble a human in any way, our imagination of such a creature is still limited so as to include humanistic attributes. Therefore, based on this example and the idea it portrays, we can validly state that we base our ideas, or beliefs, on things we experience; or rather, see. With this idea stated, we can now examine some supporting examples where something we see affects our belief, a practice that is often referred to as generalization. The devastation that occurred on September 11th, 2001 in New York City is a widely known incident. Many people stood by and watched as the two planes crashed into the world trade center in riveting seriatim and countless more stood by their televisions to witness this atrocity. It was not long before the message was out: the people responsible for this atrocity were suicide bombers from an afghani terrorist group. How has this affected our perception of people from Afghanistan? Racial profiling directed to people of the Muslim race, even people of darker skin, are stopped and more