On Reason and Belief by Jenn Zhu

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On Reason and Belief
Jenn Zhu
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On Reason and Belief
By Jenn Zhu April 18 th , 2021
It is commonly said that people without reasons are like
beasts in the season, which indicates the importance of
reasons in a humane world. Reasons technically means the
capacity of consciously making sense of things, and it needs to
apply logic. Can we say that animals have absolutely no
reasons? It is hard to define. Animals, as just humans do, can
think and plot in order to hunt for food, who should follow
certain logic and acquire some skills, which would be taken as
one way of reasoning in a broad sense of this concept. Then
how to distinguish the human reasons from animal reasons?
Human has some things that animals don’t have, that is the
self-consciousness and belief, and make their reasoning
upgraded to a higher level. Reason is not only applied to the
knowledge, institutions, science, language and art, but also to
ethics and beliefs. The self-consciousness led to the formation
of some basic human morals, while the belief led to the
common will and empowered human activity, with the former
to steer the latter and either noticeable or unnoticeable
penetrated into the latter.
The primitive people have discovered the power of belief and
started worship totem which developed into religion or other
types of belief later on. Those totem didn’t just come out of
imagination, but also from observation of the nature in their
many years of fighting against the adversary environment.
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