How Does Having Beliefs Make One Cat-like?

Another Cheap Analogy…

For many years now, my strategy for dealing with the information war being waged against us has been sképsis:

“Witness everything, believe nothing, and eventually PATTERNS EMERGE”

The important part for this post is the “believe nothing” part.

I recently had the sad experience of witnessing a good friend die in hospital of pulmonary fibrosis over the course of seven weeks. I had only known Mark for six months, and was looking forward to many years of building fond memories, and of discussing his deep Christian faith - his Bible was always next to him in the hospital bed. Ultimately, we only spent a handful of hours together. But during one of my last visits to the ICU, I mentioned the strategy above, and his reaction was immediate and forceful: “how can you call yourself a Christian if you “believe nothing”??? My answer was, “I have no need for belief because I have the PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF GRACE.” He liked that.

Point being, even for a Christian, “belief” is a secondary phenomenon if you LIVE YOUR FAITH.

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So what does that have to do with being “cat-like?” And more importantly, what does “being cat-like” even mean?

Bear with me…

Over many years I have been witnessing the behavior of cats. I like them. My most recent feline friend made it to sixteen years old, before I had to have the hospice vet come to the house to help him exit this mortal coil. That was heartbreaking…but I do have years worth of our fond memories, unlike with my late friend Mark.

One thing he loved to do was to jump into empty boxes placed on the floor. This is not uncommon with cats…search YouTube for some fun examples.

Comfy.

This begs the question, “what is it that compels cats to want to jump into boxes?”

So as not to overthink this, I will suggest the obvious answer: being in a box gives them a feeling of safety, of security. (If anyone has other theories or explanations for this kitty behavior, please leave a comment.) Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter WHY they perceive being in a box to be safe. Suffice it to say that cats are hyperaware of their surroundings, and if jumping into a box did not make them feel in some way safe, THEY WOULD NOT DO IT. Cats are inherently not reckless, unlike humans (but that’s a topic for another day).

So, my premise here is that choosing to jump into a box is “cat-like” behavior, and lately I’ve been thinking that my fellow humans are engaging in this behavior without realizing it whenever they talk about (or virtue-signal) their “beliefs.”

For me, beliefs are nothing more than boxes people choose to jump into because they help them to feel safe. For example:

- I will drive below the posted speed because it’s safer

- I will vote for candidate X because their policies promote the beliefs I hold

- I will wear a mask at home alone because it will protect me from all the nasty viruses everywhere

Many more illustratives could be listed, but you get the point: in an obviously unsafe world, people want to feel safe. Sadly, some folks will do whatever-it-takes to feel safe, whether those actions actually make them safer or not.

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Back to the cat analogy. Does being in the box really make the cat safer? Of course not, for if one closes the box, the cat goes from feeling safe to feeling TRAPPED, which is NOT what kitty wanted to feel when deciding to enter the box.

In addition, when a cat is in a box, it cannot do anything else but be in the box. It can’t grab a snack. It can’t be in the window chirruping at birds. It can’t be in your lap getting some lovin. It’s stuck in the box - until it chooses to jump out and go do something else.

When I read about people espousing their beliefs, I picture them standing in my living room in a “belief box” with a label on it:

- Here I am, being tolerant

- Here I am, being religious

- Here I am, being paranoid

How will he water his plant from in there?

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But wait…it gets better.

Of course, unlike me, most people have MANY beliefs. Hopefully these beliefs don’t contradict each other; if they do, that person suffers from cognitive dissonance (yet another topic for yet another day). So if each of a person’s beliefs were separate boxes on my living room floor, imagine the entertainment value I receive from imagining them jumping from box to box!

AI really, really tried. A for effort!

It seems to me that most people spend their lives jumping between their belief boxes, rarely pausing to rest “outside-the-box.”

But that’s where LIFE exists! Beliefs mostly just trap us in habitual thought patterns and prevent us from engaging with ideas which might help us understand our world better.

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Nowadays, I think it’s important for us to remain NIMBLE, both physically and mentally. When one “boxes oneself in,” one abdicates the freedom to update one’s operating system to reflect new information. I call that “growth.”

So get outside your boxes regularly! Go water your plant…grab a snack…sit in the window chirruping at birds. You do you!

I’ll end with the words of one of the 20th Century’s greatest minds:

Thank you for reading, and as always, STAY SKEPTICAL.