Vader, humans learnt from their parents, grandparents, and so on.Religion never happened over-night. It was always a very slow progress. Right from the very beginning when "someone,or something, powerful" was responsible for the many natural occurring events, Every volcano,ever earthquake, every storm, meant that some "higher power" was angry. And, as I have said before, we are, probably,the only animal that knows that one day we will die. Religions are always built on fear. Fear of storms,fear of volcanoes, fear of death. Religion is the belief that there "must be something after death".
I think that a belief, even a manipulation of a belief, cannot be based on dishonesty. That said, dishonesty can interfere.
As a child, I learned such things as a swimming pool full of water being soft, and the tiles in the swimming pool being solid. I could believe silly things such as inhaling water would not hurt, and experience would correct that. Or maybe I close my eyes in the water and swim around, expecting to move through more soft water, but actually there's a wall there. (Ouch, by the way.)
Later I learned that both the water and the walls in a swimming pool are made out of atoms, which are mostly made out of empty space. I still, however, believe in the difference between solid and liquid because that is my experience.
If I think that it is possible to turn mostly-empty-space matter into an experience of mostly-empty-space matter, then my own experience can teach me otherwise. I cannot swim through the wall of a swimming pool only because I did not know, and therefore did not believe, that it was there and solid.
If I tell other people that I have walked through walls, especially if I tell people here, then I might gain a "validating" experience by comments about how cool that is and for me to please teach it to the commenter. However, that is not enough for me to believe that I can do such a thing when the fact is I have not done such a thing.
In some meditations, I can feel the whole world, atoms and all, as illusionary. Or, I can feel that it is alive and personified by various animistic "gods" or personalities. Or I can feel that the latter is illusionary and the only real thing is the material world, that even those who study the material world say is not material! There are many interpretations of reality, and for all intents and purposes there can be many realities.
Our way of manipulating these realities is limited by our ways of interpreting them.
Actually you make a very good point. I don't tend to believe in things unless I've experienced them. I never believed in magick until I experienced it for myself! And most of my practice thus far has been digging through and sorting out the trash and superstition from the useful we have limitations in life so common sense dictates we would have it in magick too. The second lesson I was taught on my path is that the world is bigger then us. 3 dimensions or more! So unless we believe in magick or religion in blind faith then each of us I'll use the term believers has experienced something that causes us to believe. And not just storms and earth quakes. That might have passed for an explanation thousands of years ago but for me it's normal operation of the world around me. I'm educated now remember.
And yes we did get our knowledge of religion from our parents, and grand parents and so on but trace it back to first man and first woman. Or instead let's say first dozen men and women. Where did they learn it from. Again for me two possibilities exist. They cooked it up for themselves and myself and others like me have believed our entire lives in story book fantasy not to mention entire governments being founded on such principles or there is something to religion and some people who for whatever reasons that are their own just refuse to believe. Does not believing make it not true. No.
Note that here I speak of religion in general! I'm not pointing to any particular faith or path. And remember religion is defined as faith in a persons God or gods!
