Miserere

The issue that I dealt with in Miserere concerned belief. How do we come to know something, and how hard is it to change a belief once it is known? I know those are two unanswerable questions. The definition I have for belief is that a person(s) accepts that some proposition exists, and that it is true. Now, is that truth unchangeable? What happens when a believer is confronted with irrefutable evidence that his belief is wrong? Now, if that belief was a trust, say trust in a father, or brother, could the trust be lost in light of cheating on the part of the trusted? I think that trust could be lost, or at least tarnished, if the trusted was somehow shown to be unworthy. There are forms of belief, such as religious faith, that are so fervent that no amount of contradictory evidence can budge the believer’s confidence. I was an expert witness for a murder trial where the state brought charges against a husband and wife because they let their eight-year-old son die of an easily treated heart ailment. You see, the parents belonged to a Christian cult that believed in faith healing alone. I was hired by the prosecution to show how the parents’ group was nothing but a cult. I had time to study the parents as they sat at the defense table. I saw no evidence that they were grieved for their murder. There were tears, but they were the tears of martyrs who would sacrifice their son’s life for their twisted belief in the healing power of Scripture. Miserere deals with the question, “What would happen when a practicing Christian is confronted with overwhelming evidence that the Bible was not divinely inspired text, but was written by a man, a Roman?”