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.