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Are there benefits to practicing a belief?

At first glance yes. Believing helps limit the feeling of insecurity.

However, as soon as we study cognitive dissonance, we understand that, to this gain in terms of the feeling of security, there corresponds a loss in terms of confinement, an inability to simply manage problems.

Explanation

The objective facts are a coherent whole. A belief system can eventually also be a coherent whole. But the facts, a system of beliefs contains contradictions, therefore generates cognitive dissonance, with the inevitable product over time of lying to oneself, of the inability to simply take the facts into account, therefore of suffering for oneself or others.

And that's the whole problem: history shows us that in many cases, the practice of a belief produces a benefit for the individual, to the detriment of others. The pirouette which consists of adopting as a belief the love of one's neighbor is a beautiful idea which works little better than communism. Only love of facts produces a beneficial result, in the form of an ability to solve problems simply and rationally.

Citations

Sigmund Freud in The future of an illusion : “The first step in this direction is already a conquest. It consists of “humanizing” nature. We cannot approach impersonal forces and destiny, they remain forever foreign to us. But if at the heart of the elements the same passions rage as in our soul, if death itself is nothing spontaneous, but an act of violence due to a malignant will, if we are surrounded, everywhere in nature , beings similar to the humans who surround us, then we finally breathe, we feel at home in the supernatural, then we can psychically elaborate our fear, in which until then we were unable to find meaning. We are perhaps still disarmed, but we are no longer paralyzed without hope, we can at least react, perhaps we are not even really disarmed: we can in fact resort to the same methods against these violent supermen that we we serve within our human societies, we can try to ward them off, to appease them, to corrupt them, and, thus influencing them, we rob them of some of their power. This replacement of a natural science by a psychology not only gives us immediate relief, it shows us which path to pursue in order to dominate the situation even better. »

Learn

See additional question Why is all belief dangerous?

Refer to questions
What is cognitive dissonance?
Why is love for one's neighbor not a solid basis for living well together?
What do you have to do to be a good person?

The future of an illusion And Discontent in civilization by Sigmund Freud explains the motivation behind beliefs, except that any explanation by Freud remains biased by the fact that he focuses on drives more than on social ambition.
As for the consequences, we can usefully refer to the work of Krishnamurti, and read the book A theory of cognitive dissonance by Léon Festinger.

 

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