Oftentimes,we ask or are asked a question – “do you believe in God?” This question is also asked by an interviewer to Carl Jung. Instead of answering yes or no, he challenged the given framework or presumption of this question. The framework he challenged is not about God itself, but about “believe”. He said, “I don’t believe”. More specifically, he doesn’t believe in something for the sake of believing, rather, he would following certain rules or notions given sufficient reasons or evidences.

This is fundamentally mind-shaking. I never have thought about this question from this angel before, and I never have questioned the word “believe” as a legitimate word.

To think deep, “believe” is a weak word. It means blindly taking something as an axiom without solid proof. It reflect the miseries of our ancestors living in the stone age, when they hardly had any tools, technologies to combat the cruel nature, hence dying in despair and agony. Living under that kind of hopelessness, it’s natural for people to develop “believing” system in “all mighty” God. Now technology is far advanced in this modern era, we are fortunate to enjoy the food abundance, health security, rich entertainments, and meanwhile still equip our brain with the old inscription of “believing”, it is quite questionable.

Upon this point, some people will perhaps argue – “so do you believe in love and kindness”. My answer is that maybe you can swap the word “believe” with “recognize it is true that human beings survive and thrive in love and kindness backed up with sufficient biological, chemical, social evidences”.

See, this word “believe” can be used in such a broad and vague way, that it confuses our mind. It blends the difference between “Man-Made” and “True” Law of Nature, distorts our cognitively, as a consequence, undermines our ability to make right judgement and action in our life.

Man-made concepts include, and are not limited to,God, belief, patriotism, honor, rules… I am not stating these things are wrong, on the contrary, they are righteous existences at certain time period. But right or useful does not equate to ‘true” law of nature.

I heard the wise historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of A Brief History of Humankind, clearly stated the key difference between man-made and true law of nature is that when you violate man-made laws, you will be punished, but there is no such thing called violating the law of nature, for instance, no object with mass exceeds the speed of light. So you can’t find any thing to travel at higher than 3X10^8/sec speed to incur the punishment. Unless, this law is proved to be false or incomplete one day.

A brilliant example he cited to his arguments is that so many people citing “anti biological law” against gays, however, the mere fact there are gay phenomena defeats the validness of their argument already. Some people then vehemently state “so you can allow crimes to be committed?”. No,certainly not. Logical incoherence frequently cause people to jump into conclusions like a mess. What Yuval contends here is not about gay being right or wrong itself but the pseudo or fake scientific basis – anti biological law here. Similar to criminal law, previous mainstream banning of gay people is also a man-made rule, not a nature law, so it’s not right to cite science to defend the banning.

For all man-made rules, constitutions, an extraordinary level of caution and deliberation is always required.