In this video, Nick Kemp discusses how our environment and surroundings shape and influence our beliefs.
Forming your own belief
Nick: I was thinking, to a large degree, our beliefs about life and death, and what happens after death are not our own. They're all influenced by the culture we grew up in, the families, our interactions with others.
And if we were forced to spend a year, let's say, you're forced to spend a year researching death, life, different cultures, and then come up with your own belief, it might be very different to the one you grew up with, if you took the time to have deep reflection on all these possibilities.
I've got one friend who, you know, he grew up in a Christian family, and really believed in it. And then in his mid, I think, in his, like, early 30s, he just started questioning it. Now, he has no belief in God. He lives in the States, so he's not with his family a lot. But when he goes back to his family, he has to sit through grace and go to church on Sundays.
He'll usually say no, but if it's a special occasion, and he'll just do that to make his mother happy. But at one stage, he absolutely believed in God and heaven, and then I don't know, if it was moving away and living by himself and having maybe more freedom. But he started not to believe or started to question.
And now he doesn't believe, and to his mother, he's lost his way; and to himself he’s found the truth. It's sort of fascinating how we can have belief and then discover ‘this is not my belief, I don't really believe this.’
Gordon: That's happened to huge numbers of people.