What Do You Believe?

Everything that Rahvin said (Message 21) is something I would say as well. His point about the difference in meaning between "believe" vs. "believe in" is especially important. So, holding firmly to Rahvin's useful distinction (where "to believe X" is rather like "X seems most likely to me, given what I know so far"), I would add:I believe that ethics and morality are purely social constructs, essential to a sentient species that has evolved to depend on social organization for its survival.I believe that the "proper rules" of ethics/morality are ideas that individuals and groups have to realize and adapt to as they go along; there will certainly be a large, common core about which virtually all "normal" people will agree, but "normality" is a gradient property in any population, so there will never be complete consensus.I believe it's generally possible (and easily shown) that multiple solutions exist for any given ethical/moral problem, so a lack of consensus does not necessarily entail that one of two distinct solutions must be put down as wrong. (One of them may yield relatively less desirable outcomes in some situations, but ...)I believe that no individual or group has ever realized or adopted a complete and perfect set of "proper rules" that apply successfully in all situations; there are certainly "general" rules that provide good guidance in a wide range of circumstances, but there will always be hurdles against, and uncertainty about, the specific path that constitutes "the greatest good" in a given situation, so any claim of completeness or perfection for a given code of ethics/morals is specious. (This is separate from the intrinsically imperfect ability of people, in spite of what they know, to conduct themselves in full compliance with "the greatest good.")I believe that appeals to supernatural agency, supernatural judgment, and supernatural companionship are all varieties of deception, or at best a kind of wishful thinking that results from longing for desirable outcomes that we know, based on our real-world experience, are utterly unrealistic and could only come about "by magic."I believe in the proposition that the emergence and continued presence of life in this universe is what creates and sustains purpose in the universe; I'm not able to grasp the concept of purpose in the absence of life.I believe in the inherent ability of life as we know it to achieve continuous growth and diversification, yielding an ever expanding range of abilities, just by doing what it naturally does when given the chance; we don't know yet what life is capable of in this universe - our farthest-flung imagination may have merely scratched the surface.I'm happy to be able to play my own brief part in the story of life's progress on Earth. If it should ultimately turn out that homo sapiens sapiens leads to an evolutionary dead end... oh well, at least we can say we really tried. Life is bound to have better luck some other time or place.