Where Beliefs Come From

I'd like to speak for a few moments where human beliefs come from. There's only a few, so it won't take much time to go over them.

-Make It Up

This way to get beliefs can be very advantageous for a human's self-image, because you can make it flattering to yourself. As a bonus, you can get other humans to say they believe the thing you made up. If they do, a human can rationalize to themselves that their guess is even more likely to be true.

Examples: "People like me! I am a very charismatic person.", "If I believe something, it makes sense to believe it."

-Hear About It

You can hear about a belief or read about it. Basically, this just means that you didn't make it up yourself. It means some other human made it up and decided to tell you about it. Usually, if you like the person you hear it from, you can get a good idea whether or not you ought to believe it too. The advantage of this is that another human might have a better belief than you.

Examples: All of science. Books.

That's all there is, right? Make stuff up, or hear stuff from someone that exists, right? Wrong! There's actually a third source that humans get ideas from that's a combination of both methods so far.

-Divine Knowledge

This is sort of like a human making something up and telling you what to believe, but instead of a human making it up, there's a god of some kind making it up for you. To have this work, sometimes it helps a human to imagine- really hard- that they can hear a voice until eventually they do.

To anyone else, it sorta looks like the person made it up themselves, but they totally didn't. Some voice did. It's entirely coincidental that it just happens to benefit the holder of the divine knowledge. Part of the strength of this source is that it can't ever be wrong. Notice that it's not a 'belief'. It's called 'knowledge', so that makes it better than a belief.

A simple variant of this involves someone actually not hearing a voice, but somehow still getting the idea. Possibly by having fairies or mystic spirits psychically communicate the belief in a way that doesn't involve language in any way. Occasionally someone's god communicates this way, too.

Examples: "God says that I should have your money. Give me your money.", "God says you suck. In contrast, I'm cool. Do what I say.", "I'm a dragon."

This covers all the human sources of belief.

Funny Beliefs

As an alien, humans are very funny to me. Funny in a lot of different ways.

Generally, human beliefs are the funniest aspect of humans. Historical records and accounts paint a rather vivid image of just how bizarre humans can act, but I'm not really interested in writing about that for the moment.

Right now I'd like write about the beliefs of some humans. I would like to note that my shell is currently residing within the United States, so my remarks are geared towards that human society.

Some humans passionately believe their government is superhumanly competent. They actually somehow find it a less credulous thing to believe that hundreds of scientist fooling ninjas work for the government and that all of them are completely morally comfortable with covering up the truth in favor of perpetrating some hoax which they contributed to.

The best way rational humans have of really understanding the world is by examining things with science. Since a scientist fooling ninja- as a requirement by definition- fool scientists, the rational person must instead turn to other methods to determine how many of these ninjas the government has to plot its nefarious hoaxes.

Since I'm an alien, and we're so classically renown for being so great at fooling scientists, it stands to reason that I would be the most qualified to answer the question of how many scientist fooling ninjas the government has access to.

After I took a moment to convince myself that I was qualified to come up with a number for you, I thought for a while about what a good number would be. I'm rather fond of 4, to be honest. So there are 4 scientist fooling ninjas working for the government. Unfortunately, only 4 of these ninjas are not enough to account for the massive amounts of work required to keep various conspiracy theories credible, and so, the conspiracy theories are wrong.

Another amusing human belief is that human government can not do anything successfully. Human government is responsible for landing on the moon. Human government paves roads, highways, delivers mail, constructs schools and hospitals and maintains all of these things. Human government ensures police, courts, firefighters and emergency medical technicians, and makes sure that all humans within their government's jurisdiction have access to such things.

All of these are things the human government does. Saying that human government can not do anything successfully is saying that not one, but all of these things were not and continue to not be a success. Every time you get mail delivered by the united states postal service, you have been personally witness to an instance of government success.

Also, keep in mind those 4 government ninjas I mentioned earlier. They're extraordinarily competent, as we already know from before, so when the human government uses them it can accomplish amazing things.

If I were to help the human government, I know it would be even more successful than it already is with helping humans live better lives. Unfortunately, due to some paperwork I am imagining that I am privy to, they allow either government ninjas or government aliens, but not both. Guess I'll have to wait until the ninjas retire.

Humans Fascinate Me

Humans are fascinating to me. The number of different human beliefs are as incredible as the number of human cultures built around those beliefs. Learning about how those cultures build up and create history through complex interactions is likewise very interesting.

One aspect of human society I find highly interesting is politics. My people did not have politics in the human sense of the word. Our society was built around other things. I think this single distinction is perhaps the most important distinction between human culture and my own peoples' culture.

Precisely because human politics is so strange, I find it particularly interesting.