There are many reasons that people have beliefs. Non-belief of anything is often as much a blind faith, as belief.
People have reasons for paying more attention to either side a philosophic issue, such as whether or not crop circles are made from known methods, or whether people actually remember their experiences while clinically dead.
The reasons vary, with some balanced, and some not.
Any belief is potentially self destructive. There will be, as there has been with the UFO and other paranormal activity field in general, charlatans who will start cults around nearly any phenomena. Many insecure people who want something or someone to follow will believe nearly anything they are told. That, however, does not prove the phenomena is not valid.
The fanatics who follow cults around certain issues will do everything they can to convince people that they have the truth. Usually they will be trying to "save" people from something. The emotion I note with such people is usually anxiety.
People who are skeptical of ideas, who require some evidence of their authenticity, are often balanced. They are rational, and no one should expect them to accept anything about a subject blindly. They are careful not to accept whatever they hear of the subject, and evaluate everything carefully, both intellectually and intuitively.
Then there is the non-believer who makes a *faith* of non-belief. He or she is out to *save* people. Just as the religious or political fanatic wants to save people from some doom, these people want to save humanity from "ignorance."
Both the religious and the atheistic believers, who have this as their faith, are anxious to help people. They are always going about "proving" their truth. They find it very difficult to see the other side of the issues.
They have this in common:
They have a vested emotional interest in seeing their idea of an order of reality unchanged, whether it's all that is known and recognized in science and certain systems of logic, or it's an attachment to a personality of a conceptualized god. These people go to great lengths to "prove" their truth. The more people they can see "converted," the more comfort they receive that their status-quo is correct. This goes on in segments of society, governments, corporations, and within certain religious and occult groups all over the world.
Their sense of emotional security comes from everything being the same, and of it being clearly definable. Take away their crutches and they panic and fall. They will cling to their gods, which can take many forms such as systems of thought that seem to have an absolute correctness, or their gods.
In fact, you can show certain of these people evidence that is contrary to their beliefs, and they will read it, and in answering you, some will actually block out certain portions of what they read from their minds, and their answer clearly shows this to be true. All too often, my experience with these "skeptics," as they call themselves, is that there is no balanced skepticism, no careful evaluation of the evidence, but a close-minded prejudice. They often make comments of there prejudgement of an issue, such as how untrue the ideas are, but when you ask them to examine the issues and comment on them, they are silent.
"A prejudice is a vagrant opinion without a visible means of support." Ambrose Bierce
This desire of such fanatics to "help" others takes many forms. Some carry their mission to extreme methods, such as religious persecution, or physical force through political power. Others find public and private ridicule sufficient. Still others are masters at psychological manipulation, whether they prey on the victim's guilt or other psychological insecurities.
The point of all this is that belief or non-belief as a blind faith is detrimental. The root of this blindness is the false need for a secure and fixed footing on reality. The footing they seek cannot exist because reality is in a state of flux. We must adapt to it to live in harmony, within our minds, our souls, and with all the ideas, consciousness, and physical manifestations of reality.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. The unreasonable man adapts his environment to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable men." George Bernard Shaw
The real security needed by these people is a sense of their divine self, a reality beyond complete description, that surrounds itself with many forms, many ideas, and can continue to exist comfortably with all the varied reality forms they had been resisting.
