Belief With your Heart

I once spoke with someone from India.  In the course of a conversation, I learned that there is a belief in India that if you kill a cobra, its mate will seek revenge and kill you.  This struck me as a fun little folks-y tale.

The next day, I was thinking more about this, and asked her “Do people actually believe that?”  She confirmed that yes, people do indeed believe that.  I asked if she believed that, and she kind of hemmed and hawed.  Clearly, she knew it sounded ridiculous, but part of her did think it was true.

I said “I didn’t think that snakes have the kind of capacity for emotion and rational thought that is necessary for revenge.  Is that possible?”

She responded “Well, there are some things you believe with your head, and something things you believe with your heart.”

I believe this is what you might call “cognitive dissonance”.  In this example, we are presented two facts that conflict with each other:

1)  Cobras seek revenge on the killer of their mates.  This is a folk-tale that is taught to children as factual information.

2)  Cobras don’t have the brainpower or emotional IQ necessary to exact revenge.

Is #2 actually true?  I guess I don’t really know for sure.  But I think we all collectively agree that if we pissed of a snake out in a field somewhere and ran away, we wouldn’t be afraid of it following us to our homes.  Certainly, this is something we could test and demonstrate.

So what do we do if we have two conflicting concepts in our minds?  We rationalize, and make up something to smooth the gap.  In this case, we believe one thing with our heads and one thing with our “hearts”.  I didn’t ask what that meant, exactly.

We are constantly presented with real, observable truths about the world we live in.  On the other hand, we have stories that were taught to us as children which we’ve accepted as factually true that conflict with what we see.  But rather than give up those notions which are illogical, irrational, and unable to be proven, we just kind of wrap them up and call it “faith.”