If I believe I am deserving, and if I believe I am good, and if I believe I am fulfilling a purpose, and if I believe strongly enough in belief, then nothing else matters.

Here is my response:

I don't believe I am any more deserving than any one of the other 7,748,096,046 individuals occupying this planet in this moment. And I believe goodness is measured by effort and actions and (sometimes) results, but never exclusively by a hopeful desire or longing for everything to be okay. And I believe that if my sole or (even) overriding purpose is to believe, then I am less deserving and I am nowhere near good.

To be clear, I believe one can be less deserving and nowhere near good in one regard but not necessarily so in others. For example, an individual who fervently believes that guns are good, (and makes it obvious that his or her sole purpose, in this specific regard, is to stand behind that belief regardless of disagreement or evidence to the contrary), is unlikely to work toward or contribute to an interdependent solution for the comparably inordinate number of firearm deaths in this country, because that effort will likely work against his or her belief. To this individual, nothing else, (including the accidental shooting deaths of children), matters. Another way to say this is, to this individual, nothing tangible matters more than his or her belief. So in this regard, in this world, when the belief is paramount, I maintain that the individual entangled in belief and emotion is less deserving than those making a reasoned effort toward tangible results; and if part of to-be-good is to-do-good, then the entangled individual is not good or, at the least, less good. Yet this same individual may be simultaneously leading an initiative to feed and house homeless people, thus doing much good in this different regard.

I want to break down and take a closer look at belief. The definitions below are mine.

• Tangible Belief: Belief that drives reasoned effort and actions toward tangible results that are good.
• Intangible Belief: Belief that requires significant effort to defend, maintain and/or periodically rejuvenate, thus lessening effort toward tangible results that are good. Intangible belief drives emotionally charged or tinged effort toward intangible and/or (fewer) tangible results that have greater potential for less good.
• Duplicitous Belief: Belief that drives effort and actions toward results that are favorable for the believer; often characterized by a sleight of hand or misdirection that claims selfless / benevolent intentions though reality is otherwise.
• Good: As a broad beginning and for purposes of this week's thought, Goodness is measured First, as reasoned efforts toward; or Second, as lack of infringement upon – Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness, Safety, Security, and the General Welfare or Well-Being of First, other individuals and Second, society.

I don't believe that good can cancel out bad. I believe that reasoned effort toward good is necessary in all regards. Any amount of Reliance on intangible belief, in even a single regard, diminishes all effort in all regards. I believe it does so because it distances one from the world, thus lessening the impact of other good they may contribute.

Additionally, effort that works exclusively, or even in part, to strengthen a belief becomes part of that belief. Though it may work toward tangible, (of this world), results, it is not the type of effort that moves one from less deserving to as deserving; and it is not the type of effort that leads one toward being good.

Belief, unsupported by reasoned effort and actions, is like a film or stage set filled with second-hand props and scenery, and bad actors who believe they can act.

Duplicitous belief is more complex than intangible belief because the believer is not only working to persuade and/or trick the skeptic or nonbeliever, but some (and perhaps many) believers are also working to fool him or her self. If I claim for example that guns are good for self defense and are a deterrent to crime and I truly believe this, but I am working as a lobbyist for a large gun manufacturer, then my efforts are duplicitous and because they have become part of my belief (no matter how strong my conviction), my belief is duplicitous.

Or, in a more complex example, if I claim that guns are good and the Founding Fathers intended this right through the Second Amendment which does clearly enumerate “…the right of the people to keep and bear arms” and I couple this with some anecdotal evidence to claim that we need more guns to protect us from all the criminals with guns, then my efforts are again duplicitous, (thus again creating duplicitous belief), because by picking and choosing my evidence I am working to strengthen my belief and convince myself that I am right and advocates of more stringent gun control laws are wrong; I do this selfishly, perhaps for the sake of my ego; or perhaps because I am afraid; or maybe I just like the feelings of power and the rush of testosterone I get when I fire 41 rounds in 4 seconds. I maintain this is selfish because if I were to make the effort to study and reason, I might come across some solid research that contradicts my handpicked anecdotal evidence. And I might come across the Supreme Court decision on the Pentagon Papers in 1971 in which the court acknowledged the tensions inherent in our Constitution; (in that specific example it was tensions between a free press and national security). In his 2010 commencement speech at Harvard, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter explains that “the Constitution has to be read as a whole, and when it is, other values crop up in potential conflict.” The conflict in my example is between “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” and the right of the people to Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness, Safety, Security, and General Welfare or Well-Being. It cannot be emphasized enough: when rights conflict, we the People must choose. At what number of dead children will the right to Life eclipse the right to Bear Arms?

And of course the implications of this thought stretch far beyond the argument on gun control...