Expostulation

A belief does not in fact begin its long and usually very tumultuous life as such. It should be realized by a larger group that things you believe - those issues and statements which you are most readily willing to fight for with tooth and nail - do not always start with the lunacy they eventually expire with. Those high ideals have deeper and hidden bases. When one first comes across what will later become a fundamental fact undeniable by any level of consciousness, it must be supported by a normally logical brain. This maybe a too optimistic view for those that deny that most (if any) minds are inherently or even regularly sensical, but here it must be assumed that on some level we follow rules that follow order. And when we are first presented with our future beliefs, they are but simple facts. We must adopt some facts and discard others, for contradiction would violate our fundamental logic, no matter how compatible some facts may seem, for to the mind even morals follow logic. When these new bits enter our realm of understanding, they must first be argued, and if those arguments are held true they are bound to be remembered so that our enlightenment could be spread and forced unto those that disagree. With the passage of time these reasons that our new found facts are so obviously undeniable become so evident that we can omit them in our latest convictions. With enough time, all argument becomes moot, and the fact is fact for the fact that it is such.

And here, after days or weeks or years, depending on the ferverence of the arguments and the priority the new found holder of such obvious truths places on indoctrinating his ignorantly peers, we have a belief.

Furthermore, there is the disparaging worry of what this natural progress our psyches take with what we know to what we believe has on the developing mind. Such evolving intellects have less energy to devote to logistics, but still make sense of an enormous world. So images of a higher being are presented, or even invented to simply satiate young curiosity, and are presented with facts and arguments that such a being makes sense in a shallow pool of reason so that is MUST be true. As those ideas incubate for years and as identities are developed it is ingrained and integrated, they remain. The arguments - the REASONS - that God makes sense are lost, and no longer needed, and facts are once again omitted in favor of a common belief.