Belief... my life is full of it. I believe my future will be good, I believe I will survive until old age and that nobody will ever cut off my arms. I have no proof of this, it is simply my faith in the world.
Ethically, I believe in virtues, and I am an idealist with many beliefs about humanity, society and the environment. I believe in love and wonder and in the good in human beings. That is, there is something in us that I believe is good, and that it has the power to make more things good. I believe dogma and judgement are vices that will not create good.
Furthermore, I believe that being sentient is a fundamentally subjective experience, and that society and communication relies on vast compromise. Therefore I believe that the abilities and potential of the human mind far exceeds what we are able to express and even understand.
Herein lies a nugget of my respect for religion, because I see it as a magnificent attempt to approach a sense in existence seen through a sentient mind. A religion is humanity trying to speak a great epic about itself, words and gods that then come to life through our adherence to them. And I believe religion is a symptom of our recent cultural evolution; as we slowly moved towards a more collective state, like cells in a greater body, what used to be stories of ancestors and nature took on new roles involving power and complicated societal structures. I believe religion legitimately provides a great deal of people with subjective experiences that we once needed and received in an ancient world that no longer exists for us. I believe the "ghost" of religion is a part of humanity, which has ever been with us as an ethereal canvas on which to write who and what we are. Thus I do not believe religion is the first or necessarily the best way to paint these stories, but it is the most comprehensively wrought, and I admire it like metaphysical architecture and art.
Purely metaphysically, I believe there is sensation beyond death, whether it be the immortality of the soul or a union with the cosmos. I believe, for some reason, that I have experienced something before this life, something very different, and that I haven't been human before. Actually, these beliefs are vastly more interesting to me as reflections on my psyche, which I believe is the true and only divinity in a conscious life, than they are claims of physical facts. Even so, I believe the psyche–or subconscious–is severely limited yet hinting to a higher evolutionary stage. I believe sentient life is capable of transcending to become, in some respect, immortal gods. And I believe we might do this one day if we merge with, or are succeeded by, artificial intelligence.
Lastly, I believe that I don't get it.