Seeing or Believing?!

One gargantuan part of every human being’s life is the duality of SEEING/BELIEVING. Unlike other creatures (at least the ones we could see, not those we believe they could be), the human being’s life “fluctuates” between two extremes: SEEING and BELIEVING.

Do we have to see things so that we can later believe in them? And which should come first: SEEING or BELIEVING ? In fact, I posted this very same question on Facebook, and I received an interesting comment which did incite me to write this short essay in favour of my standpoint that you, my dear readership, would discover line in line out.

For the sake of brevity, here are two mundane situations supporting my view:

1. Suppose you received bad news about someone so dear to your heart (father, mother, brother, sister, husband, wife, lover... etc.).  And suppose that news was DEATH. And yet suppose that death news was received via a phone or a letter. Would you then simply blindly accept or believe the received news without making sure ( SEEING) whether it was (not, can) believable or not?

2. Imagine you were informed you flunked the final exam. Or, let's say, your name was not included in the final results board. You met someone ( it doesn't matter who can be: sister, brother, classmate ...) who told you that your name was crossed out from the list, or simply you flunked.  Wouldn't you on the spot move to the college and SEE whether the tidings (news) was really believable?  Would you really BELIEVE in it without SEEING it?

Note that LIFE as a whole is about SEEING and BELIEVING, each of which revovles around "things" we receive—NEWS, TIDINGS. The above-mentioned situations speak out for SEEING, not BELIEVING.

Now, let us visualise the following situations wherein BELIEVING is celebrated to the detriment of  SEEING.

1*. Suppose you were driving a car, travelling for a long time and distance. You felt hungry, so you stopped the car in the first gas station to both fill in the tank with petrol and have mushy meat grilled. Suddenly, a person passed by ( the reader is to visualise this person to be of the opposite gender). As your eyes met his/hers, you fell in love. Something inside you pushed you to BELIEVE in him/her as the one you had been looking for. What made you BELIEVE that that person was the one.

2*. As children we were to believe in our parents’ promises. “If you succeed this school year, I’ll buy you a bike”, a father might tell his/her child. 

I have always believed in SEEING is BELIEVING, but now I have come to also believe in BELIEVING is SSEING. Which comes first is an unanswerable question; it is like trying to find out which is first: the chicken or the egg.