Belief is nothing more than looking.
This is a slight alteration of the Simone Weil phrase I saw on the church that has a
display case of these things:
Religion is nothing more than looking.
It is not such a big jump from religion, which is a generic term for a kind of belief,
to the most general term. By this I include science, which is a way of interacting with the
universe, philosophy, which is also a way of making sense of the universe, ourselves,
and our place in the universe (which some think of as religion).
But looking, though I have left it unchanged from the original, may be felt
problematic in this context. But it isn't. I am often telling my students "look with your
ears," to encourage them to see the music.
And that is Weil's, and my point--whether it is a theological entity, a theoretical
entity, or a philosophical entity, we see them all through
belief.
The argument has even been made that we see the things closer to us also
through belief, and it is the breakdown of these fundamental beliefs that see the collapse of
language, and other ways we have of interacting in an immediate personal sense with the
world. | 
