Belief or knowledge?

What do you think is more important: Developing beliefs or gaining knowledge? Why?



I think that the two are too important to say that one is better than the other. Belief without knowledge is useless, and knowledge without belief is extremely dangerous. Further, belief is based, in large part, on knowledge, so with no knowledge, belief cannot exist. For instance, Native Americans were not born believing in the spirits that inhabited the sun, the animals, the plants, etc. They observed that things were chaotic and harsh, and, in true human fashion, they used that knowledge to construct something out of the chaos that did make sense; there are spirits, some malevolent, some not, that inhabit things. In this way, they used their knowledge to construct belief. As for knowledge without belief, that is a dangerous combination. If someone has tremendous power, and they know everything there is to know about manipulating people and getting anything they want, but they do not have any sort of ethical code preventing him from abusing this knowledge, then everyone is in trouble. For instance, take corrupt politicians, dictators, and the like. They have tremendous power to do good, they know exactly how they can make peoples' lives better, but instead they cheat on their wives, take money under the table, or have their people murdered. Belief with limited knowledge is also dangerous. It is the cause of hate and the myriad of horrors that follow. It is very easy, when you are leading a cause, to feed your followers only part of the truth, and let them get angry over that. For instance, in a previous post, I discussed the amounts of money that professional athletes are paid. It would be quite easy to go get the statistics, show them to a bunch of people, get them all riled up over how grossly overpaid these people are, and start a movement that had the ultimate goal of stripping professional athletes of their excess wealth. Yet in doing so, the movement would effectively destroy the orphanage or school that athlete X built, and the children would end up on the street. It would end up closing down the dozens of soup kitchens funded by athletes Y and Z, causing hundreds of the homeless to go hungry. In the end, it would result in a number of horrors just so the ignorant jerk leading the movement, and the idiots following him, could feel better about their mediocrity. The better path, in my opinion, is to combine knowledge and belief, and allow the one to support the other. It is better to achieve a balance in your growth of belief and knowledge by allowing your belief to guide your knowledge, and further your desire for it, and allow your knowledge to support and strengthen your belief. The end result of this combination is understanding, and it is only this understanding that can end the numerous atrocities that people have been committing for thousands of years.