How We Need to Do It
Heart and mind, heart and mind, we need both and not a little of either. Education in the broadest sense, which involves learning and unlearning, allows minds to evolve. In the culture of belief, the endeavor to unlearn is the better part of education. Education can only be occasioned, never forced, though schooling can be. As always, start with yourself; be an autodidact—teachers are but there to help. The aim of schooling is to assist in the full flowering of the inquiring mind. Those called teachers are minor characters. All within a community, whether they intend or not, are aware or not, serve the young, for better or worse, as teachers. Teachers heal thyselves.
Belief therapy is not in demand. Few suspect a need, and fewer see themselves in need. The need. however, is great. Belief therapists may have to become the new priests for a time, to displace the old. Unlike the priests that serve the belief culture and seek to cure unbelief, belief therapists can succeed and do themselves out of a job. Belief is not a default condition, only a weakness subject to exploitation. The role of belief therapist has a foreseeable end—the coming of the culture of inquiry.
Whenever a religionist is confronted by an alternative claim, they pick and choose, are for or against, like or dislike, and reject or assert as belief without knowing. In practice, belief therapists would compete with priests, and so organized religionists would derogatorily call them the 'new priests' of the 'new religion' that is incommensurate with their own, and that must therefore be attacked. For there to be a culture of inquiry, the belief culture must pass away one mind at a time with ever fewer young minds becoming infected.
A new religion? Not another '-ism;' not another belief system. It need not be given a name. It has no special beginnings. To think about it involves philosophy, so think what you will, but endeavor to think well. The alternative to belief is being. If religion is practice, can there be more than one? Yes, as many as there are people whose practice will change from moment to moment. Minds in a state of inquiry, however, are one. Inquiry is the common ground. Beliefs endlessly divide.
Don't believe anything you read or hear spoken. Go into it, find out for yourself what is true or false. Do the best you can and acknowledge your limitations. You will know error and will be oblivious to the error you don't know until you know it. Consider what you might know, what you don't know, and thereby seek true knowledge. Consider how you live, how you may not be living..., live and awaken.
People under delusion are obstinate in their beliefs. Humans who would rather believe than know are possessed. They seek to take refuge in the believing mind. In it, they can believe anything they want to provided it feels good. It feels good to hate and beliefs feed the flames of contempt. Humans need to feel good, but embracing the certitudes of belief, having beliefs and being had by them, to be possessed by beliefs that make you feel good, is a Faustian bargain.
The beliefs could be religious, but politics appeals too. You can believe Jesus saves and loves you, or lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāh, muḥammadur-rasūlu-llāh. In the twentieth century politics has been the fervent belief of choice and it looks like the twenty-first century will double down on politics. Organized religion offers salvation, while politics offers solutions. Both traffic in illusion and human weakness. In the twenty-first century people are going to demand both, so learning Arabic, the lingua franca that may come, may be adaptive.
The flavor of the Kool-Aid you drink doesn't much matter: Ayn Rand Libertarian, Liberation Theology, Tea Party Conservative, Zionist Jew, Progressive Liberal, Jihadist Brother, People's Revolutionary, and thousands more as identity religion and politics is that seductive. It can pull you in, fill you, possesses you.... Billions of true believers can't be wrong, so pick one.
In the USA in the 1970s there were times when on average there was a bombing every eight days just in the San Francisco Bay area alone. Read history: all the protests and bombings just felt good to those acting out. They didn't affect the shopping much, the cars rolled on, and the course of the war rolled on its merry way. It didn't begin because protesters demanded it start, nor did it end because protesters demanded it end. Those who would destroy the system should understand how it works. You have an Allah given right to believe whatever you want. It's in the US Constitution, Bible, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Koran.
No one is the belief-induced image you have of them, and you are not the image you or others have of you. If the image doesn't feel good, whether to love or hate, you won't believe it, have or be had by it. No believer can, such being the nature of the believing mind. Humans will not change their ways until they come to just say no to the believing mind. That is the revolution that needs to come.
You are not the beliefs that possess you. They have been grafted on, or rather have grafted themselves on as viral memes taking advantage of a weakened cognitive immune system. It is the capacity for doubt that is curative. It doesn't matter if you are a Rush Limbaugh Ditto-head or a Che Guevara Revolutionary with a bit of Mao added. A lack of certitude will set you freer. Disbelieve in six possible things before breakfast and the fog will lift. You'll feel better in the end.
Do not hate. Why do humans love to hate? Sometimes it doesn't take religion. For hate, politics is also great. All revolutionaries, all ideologues and their supporters, "must have someone or something to hate." What too many humans are doing has, with slight variations on the theme, happened to hundreds of millions. You may make history of a sort, but not in the way you envision. Billions have been wrong before you. "If this be error and upon me proved....."