Where do your beliefs come from? Did you get your religion from your parents or did you reject your parents view completely? Did you make a decision to believe what you believe based on logic or did your values come by absorbing the views of your community or culture? Do more highly educated people have different beliefs than less highly educated people?

It’s hard to answer these questions, at least for someone who hasn’t read a lot of scholarly literature about the subject. The point is that beliefs come from a lot of places for a lot of reasons and most of them are not acquired based on a logical evaluation of all possible alternative beliefs.

Religion and culture are good examples. There are probably people who chose a religion after carefully evaluating and comparing all the tenants of the world’s spiritual practices. But more than likely the religion you have is the one your parents had, and you adopted it without really being aware that there were alternatives. And even without exploring the alternatives, there are many Christians who believe they have a handle on the ultimate governing principles of human reality. Those who were raised in other traditions believe just as fervently that they are the most righteous.

In this country, it kind of goes without saying that “America is the best country on earth.” Many, if not most of us, simply except this. We have an ingrained bias against anyone who is not American, even if we know intellectually that being born in any particular location doesn’t make a human being superior to another human being.

The fact is that beliefs drive behavior and if we are going to pull together as a species to solve the imminent planetary crises that we face, we have to take control of our beliefs. They can’t be random. We need to come together around a set of beliefs that recognizes that we are more alike at the core than we are different. Before we think of ourselves as Americans or any other nationality, we have to think “I am a human being on planet earth.”

This bigger picture vision locates us more appropriately for working together and appreciating our common humanity.