Real men and women don't believe

Here's a playbook for radical living.

I believe that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen because the consensus of scientists who have no agenda but clear perception has found it to be true. It's not something I personally know, as I don't have the skill to have such a perception.

I know I love my wife because that's the word – "love" – that I care to apply to a complexity of feelings that include oceanically deep warmth, utter need, attraction, sadness, anger. It would be more accurate simply to list the different feelings, but the shorthand term is useful.

I sometimes enjoy feeling that the universe is mysterious not simply because human knowledge – perception, logic and reason – cannot grasp the why but only something of the what, but because there might actually be something magical, childlike and awesome about its nature. The shorthand for that is God. As often, though, I am satisfied to lie in the fact of mystery.

I accept that people must form agreements having to do with self-preservation. I've accepted that something in human nature has urged people to build wide associations, even an entire nation of basic agreements. I've resigned myself to the fact that this manifest urge has enabled powerful people to gain the upper hand time and again. While I value some aspects of radical liberty and autonomy, and some aspects of social sacrifice, I find that I feel most strongly against people whose sickness leads them to hate and who want power over others. My feelings are too varied, too shaded, to be simplified as a "belief system."

There is nothing I "believe" without the evidence of my own perception or the answers of science, or in some circumstances the word of a trusted friend. This rules out deity, broad political affiliation, conspiracy theories, the basic good or evil of humanity.

Belief is for children who do not have the felt knowledge that their parents are good. A child will internalize the parent's badness ("daddy wouldn't have to yell at me if I behaved") to keep the parent good in her mind, and will then live on the delusion of a belief. Call it a dream. Or the escape from a nightmare.

I don't think anyone else needs belief. We would be able to live in the molecular mess of our feeling, if we could heal or accept the child within us.