Index

B

The Biblical tale of Moses in the bulrushes has been told to countless millions of children over many generations. Adherents to the faith are led to believe that this episode is a unique event in the “sacred history” of the ancient Jews, but is this really so? See Bible.

behavior To understand behavior in the sense peculiar to metahistory, it is helpful to follow the proposal of R. D. Laing and distinguish behavior from experience:

I see you, and you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behavior. You see my behavior. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me... Experience is man’s invisibility to man. [At the same time] it is more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence... Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things... Natural science knows nothing of the relation between behavior and experience. The nature of this relation is mysterious. (P, 18-19)

behavioral cloning Proposed term for the hive behavior of a society driven by unquestioned beliefs or by technological prosthetics. Both beliefs (especially religious beliefs) and prosthetics (that is, tools that replace human faculties and functions) depend for their efficacy on a prior condition: disembodiment of the human subject, or the strong tendency toward disembodiment. See also discarnation.

In the long-term overview developed in this site, behavioral cloning is seen as developing historically in three phases:

Initial Phase: introduction of religious ideology of salvation, including the idea of the Incarnation. Approximately 1800 BCE - 400 AD.
1800 is the date generally assigned to era of the Biblical Patriarch Abraham.

Middle Phase: repression of body knowledge in favor of abstraction. Approximately 400 BCE - 1200 AD (the Dark Ages), overlapping and extending the Initial Phase. 400 BCE marks the death of Socrates and the rise of Platonic abstraction.

Terminal Phase: replacement of human faculties, and eventually the human organisim itself, by artificial entities. Approximately 900 CE to the present, overlapping the Middle Phase, with a surge at 1600 (the Enlightenment). The date 900 CE represents the introduction of the zero into Western science.

This entire trajectory of development would not have been possible if the quest for transcendence from the blocking of the ego-self had not been diverted into a quest of the ego-self to transcend nature. (By "blocking of the ego-self," I mean the psychological necessity of the social ego to turn off its connection with nature so that it can develop a field of human-based, culture-oriented relations. Genuine transcendence, such as was offered in the Mystery School initiations, involved temporary dissolving of the ego-blocks and melting of self-consciousness so that nature is once again encountered as the numinous source of life.)

In his landmark essay, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," IT pioneer Bill Joy wrote:

Once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species—to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself... But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far likely that a robotic existence will not be like a human one in any sense we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost.
(In Taking the Red Pill, ed. by Glen Yeffeth, p. 250ff.

By themselves the Archons can do nothing but insinuate. They rely heavily on our tendency to give over our power by wrong use of imagination. Let's recall the alchemical teaching quoted in Sources of the Gaia Mythos: "Let thy imagination be guided wholly by nature... And observe according to nature, through whom the substances regenerate themselves in the bowels of the earth. And imagine this with true and not with fantastic imagination." Our problem — without question, the single most threatening spiritual problem of our species — is that we do not adequately or consistently distinguish the true from the fantastic imagination.

How we lost the "Old Gnosis" (illumined body-knowing of Sacred Nature), and how Judeo-Christian monotheism gradually undermined the imaginative faculties we need to co-evolve with Gaia, are lucidly explained by Theodore Roszak in Where the Wasteland Ends.

One of the most reliable tactics of the Archons is simulation (hal in Coptic). We might assume, then, that they are capable of simulating life to the point where their simulation cannot be distinguished from the real thing. Not so. The Archons cannot make pearls from plastic, but we can become so dull in sense perception that we cannot distinguish plastic from pearl. Gnostic seers ascertained that Archontic simulation is largely a faking process, like the special effects of the Wizard of Oz. Our alien cousins cannot actually simulate the human organism, but if they can convince us that they can do so, we risk making the simulation look real because we grant it reality in our own imaginations. Gnostics taught that the Archons can do nothing without our complicity—and, in fact, we are the ones who do most of the work for them! The power of human imagination is immense (Gnostics called this faculty the luminous epinoia), and the Archons rely on stealing its inventive fire to pass off their simulations as real.

Consistent with this tactic, the Alien Dreaming seduces us into believing that all kinds of ridiculous things are possible, or even have been achieved already. The fear factor plays beautifully into our inflated expectations. For instance, we live in breathless anticipation that a human being will be physically cloned, perhaps with a little help from our alien cousins on the biotechnological points. Fearing this will occur, or eagerly waiting for it to occur, we do not see what is actually occuring, what is actually happening to us. It is as if we lived in a building under constant threat of an earthquake while acid is silently eating away the foundations. This tactic of distraction, or misdirection, is extremely effective.

Consequently, the world today is constantly jolted with the immanence of human cloning, while behavioral cloning proceeds unnoticed.

Common forms of behavioral cloning are: rote learning of religious scriptures (often accompanied by shaking the head, seen with devout Jews at the Wailing Wall, or the entire body, seen in Muslim schools where children are forcefully indoctrinated), conformity to empty religious formulas and vicarious rites (in the Catholic mass, for instance), usage of mobile telephones (involving the same set of gestures around the world: eyes fixed on keyboard to text messages, phoneset to ear while walking, eating, driving, etc), flag-waving and slogan-chanting at political rallies, the spiked fingers gesture of heaving masses at rock concerts (Who remembers that at the original Woodstock gathering, Frank Zappa told the immense crowd of hippies, "You are all wearing uniforms."?), mass gymnastic spectacles in Korea and China, dance crazes and mindless imitation of dance moves modelled by pop idols and mimicked by "Star Academy" candidates, accumulation of designer labels and chic logos, self-cloning via video-game "avatars"....

Furious and unabated, these and other forms of behavioral cloning proceed without the blink of an eye. Indeed, they are encouraged and enforced at every turn, especially where financial gain is at stake. Their effect is to reinforce the zombie mentality that allows them to occur in the first place. The dynamic of behavioral cloning is a classic case of "positive feedback" — an unfortunate designation, however. In the language of complexity theory (formerly, chaos theory) positive feedback is a self-enforcing loop that eventually spins out of control and self-destructs. On an icy road, when a car begins to slide out of control, the smart driver will steer slightly and steadily in the direction the car's rear end is shifting, thus correcting the spin. This exemplifies "negative feedback," but I propose it would be better called corrective feedback. Many of the natural processes on earth, such as the formation of the polar icecaps and the carbon cycle, demonstrate corrective feedback.

If the driver on an icy road panics and makes the seemingly logical move to steer out of the slide (i.e., away from it), the car goes into an uncontrollable spin. This is positive feedback, but I would prefer to call it dystrophic feedback. Dystrophy (from dys-, "abnormal, impaired," + tropos, "turn.") is a physical disorder of the limbs characterized by the wasting of organs and tissues, as in muscular dystrophy. Dystrophy — literally, "a turn for the worse" — is more radical than entrophy, which is merely the passive running down of a system. Dystrophic feedback leads to violent disintegration of an organiism or machine. In short, it is the path of catastrophic breakdown.

Behavioral cloning is extremely deceptive because the high degree of conformity it demands gives the impression of order and stability. Yet a society driven by behavioral cloning will, sooner or later, enter the path of catastrophic breakdown. Behavioral cloning is the norm in societies where the ruling powers are blindly driven to pathological extremes, such as the Sun sacrifice madness of the Aztecs. As noted above, behavioral cloning is driven from within by belief and lured or entrained from without by technology and trickery (i.e., "magic," as in the case of Aztec magical ceremonies to feed blood to the dying sun). When beliefs and technology combine, the formula is lethal.

Gnostics taught that the Archons do not autonomously cause us to deviate from our proper course of evolution, but they exploit our tendency to let our errors extrapolate beyond the scale of correction— i.e., to verge on dystrophic feedback. To my knowledge, no other ancient teaching carries such a clear predictive view of the risk of evolutional deviance inherent to human social behavior. The Gnostics may have been silenced 1600 years ago, but they can still speak vividly to us today.

The dynamics of behavioral cloning can also be understood by way of two seminal ideas proposed by cultural anthropologist Rene Girard: mimetic desire and the mechanism of unanimity. See Girardian theory.

belief Loosely, whatever an individual is willing to accept without direct verification by experience or without the support of evidence, and take as a basis for action or non-action. From Old Welsh, Saxon and High German roots such as galaubjan, “cherish, trust.” From y + laub, “that which is held dear.”

The related root leif has fallen out of use. It is close to the word life, hence it is not surprising that belief can be as dear as life itself; but it is also related to leave and love. In archaic parlance, one would speak like this: “I would as lief stay here and die than ford that stream and die trying to cross it.” “As lief” means “I would rather.” It refers to what one is willing to do. To be-lieve is to be-willing. To believe something is to be-will it, to will it into existence.

As just noted concerning the difference between behavior and experience, belief does not merely dispense with the evidence of experience, it can go further and deny the evidence of experience. And it often does. Therein lies the power of belief. Belief is motivation by reliance on an assigned version of reality (for instance, the belief that potato blight caused widespread starvation in Ireland around 1840) or an assigned version of what might be imagined (for instance, the belief that God will resurrect those poor souls who died in the potato famine).

Ultimately, the problem introduced by belief is not a matter of believing versus non-believing, because annulment of the will to believe is not possible. The true conflict here, upon which depend both the moral and survival orientation of the human species, is between believing and learning.

belief-change The act of changing what one believes, especially by examaning and rejecting received beliefs and adopting aligned beliefs; and, going even more deeply into this process, by changing the way one views belief itself. I call these the relative and radical forms of belief-change, respectively.

See Feedback on this topic.

In metahistorical analysis, defining yourself by what you believe looks like an extremely dangerous procedure. Unless you are able to determine if the beliefs you hold are insane and inhumane, the identity acquired through adopting beliefs could be delusional.

Of course, most people in the world today did not adopt the beliefs they hold in the first place. Our beliefs are more often chosen for us than by us. Relative belief-change begins with the act of questioning the beliefs chosen for us by family, racial background, culture, education, religion and government. If any of those beliefs are found to be untrue or harmful, then can be rejected, and others adopted in their stead.

Prizewinning author Barry Lopez has written extensively on the link that connects humans with nature. Like many others, Lopez was brought up to believe that humans are distinct from and superior to all other animals — if, indeed, humans can be considered to be animals at all. Lopez gradually abandoned this belief as untrue and exchanged it for a belief in the kinship of all species. Describing this shift, he said, "I would say that seeking nature has caused me to change my identity. I now regard myself as part of nature." The belief-change undergone in his life involved throwing off an entire sets of beliefs about how humanity is related to the natural world, the non-human and the Other. This process led to the dissolution of the entire belief-system chosen for him. Lopez presents an example of advanced belief-change, but it is still relative, still a matter of exchanging one belief or set or beliefs for another.

Radical belief-change goes beyond shedding particular beliefs or exchanging one belief (humans are separate from and superior to nature) for another (humans are part of nature, and not dominant to other species). Radical change involves a deep shift in the way beliefs are viewed, rather than a mere shift in belief. One of the most difficult but crucial lessons of metahistory is that we can assess beliefs to see it they are insane and inhumane. Doing so, we look deeply into the dynamic of belief. One of the first things we learn is that the power of particular beliefs depends in large measure on the nature of belief being left unquestioned and unexamined. Metacritique delves into the dynamic of believing.

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." To rephrase this famous statement in metahistorical terms, we could say, "The unexamined belief is not worth holding." True enough, but the examined belief may not be worth holding, either. In other words, a great many beliefs, once they are examined, may prove to be worthless as indicators of truth or guides to experience, although they may serve to define identity and confer a sense of belonging. One of the more astringent lessons of metahistory is that beliefs are not adopted because they are true, but come to be regarded as true because they have been adopted. (This argument is developed via a dialogue process in Socratic Sessions, One.) Their value is not to carry truths that are acquired from the direct experience of the individual, but to insure the individual identity and participation in social terms.

Beliefs are tools for social conditioning, rather than expressions of inner realization or universal truth.

See also Morris Berman on ideologies.

It must be said, however, that radical belief-change carries a definite risk of social alienation, because so much of what happens in human society depends on the sharing of unexamined beliefs. One can become very unpopular very quickly by putting certain beliefs in question, especially religious beliefs. Radical belief-change is always intimate and deeply personal, specific to the individual who undertakes it. It may be debatable that belief-change of this kind is even possible on the social level, because it would dissolve the very fabric of society.

Relative belief-change is a way to overcome the conditioning that prevents us from realizing our authenticity as human beings. It is a path of spiritual awakening and transformation. Radical belief-change is a way, not only to overcome, but also to oppose the conditioning that deviates us, individually and collectively, from the true potential of humanitas. In metahistory we consider these two forms of belief-change to be the most effective strategies for shifting human behavior at the individual level, and, beyond that, perhaps for plotting a course correction for the human species as a whole.

belief-system An ensemble of beliefs, usually codified in a system of religious ideology and including rules for behavior, taboos, a dress code. Islam is a belief system. The characteristic of a belief-system is “package deal”: if the believer adopts even one element of the system he or she becomes implicated in the entire ensemble.

Bible The main sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, probably the most widely published and most read book of all time. It consists of two parts, the Old Testament (OT) and New Testament (NT). Describing the OT, one scholar writes:

The many “books” that make up the Hebrew Bible (39 in English versions, but 24 in Hebrew) have many stories to tell, written almost entirely by anonymous authors. These stories were set down over a period of a thousand years, the whole finally woven into a composite, highly complex literary fabric sometime in the Hellenistic era (ca. 2nd century B.C.). This vast “library” — for that is what the Bible actually is — contains such diverse and indeed contradictory forms as myths, legends and folktales, sagas, heroic epics, oral traditions, annals, biographies, narrative histories, novellae, belles lettres, proverbs and wisdom-sayings, poetry (including erotic poems — read the Song of Solomon without your spiritual blinders on), prophecy, apocalyptic and much more.
Lloyd M, Graham, Deceptions and Myths of the Bible, p. 33

Despite the patchwork nature of both Testaments, those who take these writings for the “revealed word of God” see in them a coherent account of the operations of divine will in human history. Fundamentalist belief insists that nothing can be changed in Holy Writ, nor can any word or sentence be improved and expanded. To those who believe it is the result of superhuman authorship, the Bible cannot be amended or questioned.

In his comparative study of heroic narratives, The Hero, Lord Raglan showed that the child in the bulrushes was a stock feature in ritual tales of divine kingship. By demonstrating that this and other incidents in the lives of Moses and Jesus occur in many scripts, Raglan proved that sacred history is a formula-story composed of many borrowed tales, not a seamless narrative unique to Judeo-Christian tradition. (Engraving, Gustav Dore)

Nevertheless, countless commentaries and sermons have been produced through two millennia to explain and legitimate its contents.

The Bible poses daunting problems for metahistorical inquiry. How it came it be written is not difficult to understand, but how it came to assume the influence it has had is far more difficult to determine. The Old Testament covers a span of time from the first moment of creation down to the tumultuous historical period a couple of centuries BC.

With the rise of Christianity the canon of the New Testament was eventually established by a long and erratic process of editing and censure. With the association of the two Testaments there arose the belief that the events described in the OT somehow led to the mission of the messianic figure, Jesus, in the NT; although this linkage is totally rejected by Jews. How the tribal history of the ancient Jews (OT) came to be viewed as a universal parable of the interactions between God and humanity and, beyond that, the prototypal drama due to be enacted on the stage of history, is a problem of paramount importance in metahistory. See also sacred history.

Those who look to the Bible as the “Word of God” believe that it is a sacred text. To millions of people, the contents of the Bible are not merely statements about the Sacred (Divine), but the statements themselves (the Ten Commandments, for instance) are held to be sacred. How and why certain propositions about the Sacred come to be viewed as sacred in their own right is another problem of paramount importance in metahistory.


Biblical UFOlogy The category of studies and speculations which propose that angels described in the Bible — such as those seen in the visions of Ezekiel, or the one who wrestled with Jacob at the Jabbok ford on the Jordan River, or the Angel Gabriel who announced the birth of Jesus to Mary — were actually extraterrastrials or ET-like entities who are assumed to have a benevolent attitude toward humanity, consistent with the fulfillment of "God's plan."

A subset of intervention theory, Biblical UFOlogy treats events described in the Old and New Testaments as testimony of encounters with aliens, i.e, non-human entities assumed to be of superior intelligence and advanced evolution. In some respects, this theory dovetails with the hypothesis of "ancient astronauts" made famous by Erich von Daniken. In both cases, supernatural events attributed to God are implemented by ET-like entities manifesting as angels. If the ET/angels are assumed to have been sent by God, the question of whether or not they proceed from advanced civilization elsewhere in the universe remains open. The main assumption is, they are allies and instruments of the Will of God. This belief reflects the deep religiosity of ET/UFO speculation.

All the best (i.e, most intellectually sophisticated, well-informed, cogent and critical) commentators on the ET/UFO enigma agree on its religious dimension:

Did ancient man misinterpret UFO manifestations by placint them in a religious context? Apparently not. The literature indicates that the phenomena carefully cultivated the religious frame of reference in early times, just as the modern manifestations have carefully supported the extraterrestrial frame of reference.
- John Keel, Operation Trojan Horse, p. 216

Contactee organizations may become the basis of a new "high-demand" religion. The current conservative backlash against "decadent" morality and social liberalism has led many to consider their spiritual orientation. The Catholic Church is at a critical point in its history, and many other religions are in trouble... The creeds of UFO organizations often emphasize themes of sexual repression, racial segragation, and conservative values... Especially noticable in this respect is the attention received by "the Two" and the widespread Melchizedek groups. Inherent in such sectarian activity is the seed of revolutionary religious movements of almost unlimited potential.
- Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception, p. 241

The aliens take the place of a God of salvation history working for humanity's redemption. The goal of history, according to seduction narratives, is not the union of God and man in Christ; rather, it is the union of humanity and alien towards which the UFO godlings strive. The barely disguised grafting of these theological elements of America's most popular religion onto the bizarre phenomenon of UFO abductees argues strongly for the phenomena's strongly religious character.
- John Whitmore, "Religious Dimensions of the UFO Abductee Experience," in The Gods Have Landed, edited by James R. Lewis.

Gnostics, however, took an entirely different of view of ETs allied with the Creator God. The Gnostic theory of Alien intrusion states, first, that one specific type of inorganic being, called Archons, is predatory toward humanity, and second, that the Creator God of the Old Testament is a reptilian of the Archontic species, a demented deity who falsely considers himself to be the master and maker of our planetary world, and is actively working against the evolution of humanity. Thus, Gnostics assumed malevolent intent on the part of Jehovah, the supreme deity of Judeo-Christianity, whom they called Ialdabaoth. They warned of a pseudo-God at loose in the cosmos who works to deceive and deviate the human species from its proper course of evolution.

Gnostics were specific in exposing the motive and method of the Archons and their overlord, Jehovah-Ialdabaoth. They saw in the Judeo-Christian ideology of salvation both the evidence and instrument of alien subterfuge. Hence, their views represent a diametric opposite to Biblical UFOlogy insofar as the latter assumes that ET/Aliens are doing God's Will and serving the true needs of humanity. By contrast, Gnostics taught that the Archons want to alienate us from our true birthright, the wisdom endowment (nous) of the Goddess Sophia. In Gnostic cosmology, the emergence of the Archon species in the cosmic order is a special episode in the Fallen Goddess Scenario. In Biblical UFOlogy the entire narrative ignores any reference to the Goddess Sophia or her ancient cognates, such as Asteroth and Astarte, telluric female divinities of ancient Palestine to whom Sophia (vaguely indicated by the Hebrew Shekinah) can be equated.

The seminal text of Biblical UFOlogy, The Bible and Flying Saucers, was published in 1968, thus preceding von Daniken by several years. Its author, Barry H. Downing, was a serious Biblical scholar whose research is deep and whose writing is sober and carefully measured. Often his tone is gently chiding of traditional belief: “One may not be pleased with the theological implications that Christ ascended in some sort of space vehicle, but the implications fit the evidence better than the suggestion that there was no Ascension at all.” (p. 47-8) Downing’s intention is to preserve the miraculous aspects of Biblical history, but to explain them in terms of advanced technology; yet he does not impose this explanation, he merely proposes it.

Downing’s assertion that “beings from another world were the external agent which caused the Hebrew-Christian tradition” (p. 47) seems to parallel the Gnostic view that Judeo-Christian doctrines were inspired by the deviant entities called Archons— but, of course, Downing assumes that "the Hebrew-Christian tradition" is a valid religious trajectory of humanity, and Gnostics did not. In Downing’s view, the alien origin of the Hebrew-Christian tradition does not invalidate the doctrines it carries, or the "sacred history" it embodies, because he assumes that flying saucers and ETs might well be the means God has adopted to teach and guide humanity. Gnostics, by contrast, believed that the Archons used Judeo-Christian doctrines to infect humanity with errors and deviate it from its proper course of development.

At the very moment when Judeo-Christian ideology was taking shape, Gnostics came forth from the relative anonymity of the Mystery Schools and engaged the proponents of the new religion in argument, pointing in no uncertain terms to the erroneous and deviant nature of such doctrines as monotheistic creation, the moral sovereignty of Jehovah, dominion of the human species over the Earth, the repression of the Goddess, sin and redemption, the incarnation of divinity in human form, vicarious atonement, blind faith in the saving power of Jesus, the resurrection of the body in the end time, and divine retribution. Almost nothing is left of the Gnostic protest against these ideological and supernatural tenets of Christianity, because thaat protest had to be entirely eradicated so that the Christian program of salvation could be propagated without informed resistence or critical dissent. The fifty-odd texts in the Nag Hammadi cache are pitiful fragments, mere flakes of what once was expressed in parchments and codices that ran into the tens of thousands, filling the libraries of the Mystery Schools in Biblos, Antioch, Alexandria and elsewhere, all over the classical world.

The teachers from the Mystery Schools refuted such doctrines as these in oral argument as well as in countless tracts and full-length books that were later destroyed so that no convincing refutation of salvationist doctrines survived. But Gnostics only launched a frontal assault on the beliefs of the early Christians: they did not attack the Christians themselves. By contrast, the converts to the new religion that eventually was codified in two vast movements, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christianity, physically attacked the Gnostics, destroyed their writings, and demolished the Mystery Schools.

Heresy had to be invented — and eradicated — so that the One True Faith could prevail.

Thus Christianity arose from a centuries-long program of spiritual-intellectual genocide. The true story of the destruction of the indigenous spiritual traditions of Europa has yet to be told. Unfortunately, the well-meaning attempts of Biblical UFOlogists to reconcile the modern ET/UFO phenomenon with the "Divine Plan" completely disregard the Gnostic protest against Judeo-Christian religion. Doing so, they perpetuate the cover-up of the single greatest spiritual catastrophe in our history — the destruction of Gnosis, the way of knowing as the Gods know.

ET/Archon Navigator

The full term "psychosomatic illuminism" is correct, but awkward. I maintain that biomystical practices were systematically taught in the Mystery Schools of Pagan Europe (Europa). Evidence of such practices is skant, not because it never existed, however. Rather because almost all traces of what was actuallydone and taught in the Mysteries has been destroyed. Nevertheless, traditions of Asian mysticism provide plenty of examples that can be equated with probable counterparts in the Western Mysteries. For instance, siddhis, occult powers such as clairvoyance and clairaudience, are widely attested among Asian mystics. It can be inferred that some Gnostic "revelation discourses," such as the Discourse on the Eigth and the Ninth (NHL VI, 6), are transcriptions of visionary states or clairaudient sessions.

Early Theosophic scholars such as G. R. S. Mead routinely assumed that Gnostics attained the same powers as their Asian counterparts. Like Tantra, biomysticism uses the body and sense-impressions to explore and expand consciousness. M. A. Williams (Rethinking 'Gnosticism') refutation of the world-denial attributed to Gnostics supports the idea that Gnostic spiritual practices were body-based. In modern psychology, no one has contributed more to the basis we need for understanding biomysticism than Wilhelm Reich. In Ether, God and Devil, he wrote:

In order to investigate nature, we must literally love the object of our investigation. In the language of orgone biophysics, we must have direct and undisturbed orgonotic contact with the object of our investigation.... Sensation is the greatest mystery of natural science. (p. 63, 96)

What Reich calls "orgone," the pervasive cosmic life-force, Gnostics knew as Eros. Orgonotic and Erotic are competely interchangeable terms. Reich's notion of "organ sensation as a tool of research" is a succinct formula of biomysticism. (For an introduction to the life and work of Wilhelm Reich, see Michael Mannion's essay in Invited Views.)

blind belief: refuses to be questioned or examined. Contrast to open belief.

Example: in the recent controversy over displaying a shrine inscribed with the Ten Commandments in the lobby of a courthouse of Alabama, supporters of the shrine stated their belief that Jesus Christ is the supreme authority on human justice. This is a belief they refuse to question or examine. They can only impose it on others, or persuade others to accept it, but they cannot put it in suspension in their own minds. So great was the blindness in this instance that the believers totally disregarded the separation of church and state.

For a complete list of permutations of belief see Modes of Believing.