Just Words?

I used to not give much thought to the words "belief" or "believe" except to evaluate the subject to which they referred. Similarly, with the word "innocent", which has a much different connotation when used to describe, say, the finding of a jury in a criminal proceeding than when used to incite or inflame passions. For example, if you hear that, "3000 innocent Americans died in a terrorist attack." or, "A million innocent babies are aborted every year." you should know the word "innocent" is there to emphasize the outrage, the injustice of the act. It is intended to be prejudicial, to push your emotional buttons, to make you feel rather than think. When I hear the word "innocent" used in a manner calculated - consciously or unconsciously - to prejudice, I tend to wonder, like Sheriff Little Bill in the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven: "Innocent of what"?  The 3000 or so people who died in the Twin Towers almost certainly included some number of thoroughly despicable people. I would suppose that statistically you could expect that some were guilty of heinous acts at some point in their lives. To acknowledge that takes nothing away from the fact that flying planes into buildings to kill a lot of people who didn't do anything to you is an act of destructive lunacy. An aborted fetus is innocent only because it has not had the opportunity to do anything good or evil. It could grow up to be Einstein or Hitler.

Recently in Newsweek I read a little piece about (I think) the 5 most common questions people asked on an online dating site. The one that caught my attention was: Do you believe in miracles? So people are evaluating prospective mates based on how deeply they are immersed in fantasy land rather than their grasp on reality? Has there ever been any objective, verifiable evidence that a professed miracle has ever occurred? Science has begun to examine beliefs where they occur: in the brain, by using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). This is fascinating, of course, but unlikely to cause any sudden outbreak of reason and rationality. I suspect that those most likely to believe in miracles are also those least likely to read scientific articles or ponder scientific conclusions. It is potentially instructive, as well as humorous, to recall Mark Twain's observation that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth (yet another over used and abused word in my opinion) is still putting on its shoes. We've always known that people believe things that aren't factual so why doesn't that make us question our own beliefs?