Waging war is not all that easy. In war we kill, and die, and suffer the devastation of wartime injuries, both physical and psychological, not to mention the loss of national treasure. But to my mind, as hard as war is, making peace is that much harder. Why? In war, we fight for what we believe. And we all feel good about fighting for our beliefs. It gives us goose bumps just thinking about it.

But for peace to happen we often have to give up some of our deeply held beliefs, in a search for something we can believe in even more, like peace. And it's hard to let go of our beliefs. It's like letting go of a part of ourselves, because to a great extent, especially in modern times, we are what we believe. Not that it had to be that way, and not that it was that way for most of our existence as a species, but it is that way today.

And so it seems that our beliefs are at the heart of issues of war and peace. What we choose to believe will very much determine whether we head toward war, or toward peace. The question arises, therefore: What are the legitimate grounds for belief? Or put another way: How do we know that what we believe is true?

Would it be too much to suggest that most of us come to most of our beliefs by sheer chance? Let's take religion as an example, since religious beliefs are often a cause of violence and war. Isn't it the case that most of us adopt our religious beliefs due mostly to the families we happen to be born into? For the most part, we are Jews, or Christians, or Muslims, or Hindus, or Buddhists because our families are. A Jew could have been a Muslim if only he were born into a different family. Once in a while people convert, but for the most part, that is the exception, not the rule.

Does it make sense that the accident of birth confers legitimacy to our beliefs? And what kind of legitimacy are we talking about? We're talking about the legitimacy that would have us kill one another in God's name, no less, because somebody else's beliefs are different from our own. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture?

Maybe we can point to other sources of legitimacy for our beliefs, sources which can truly confirm the validity of our beliefs. Maybe we can point to Holy Scripture as the confirmation of God's truth. The trouble is, however, that all religions contain scriptural passages which are not palatable to the modern mind. In Judaism, for example, the book of Deuteronomy tells us that if a man marries a woman, and she turns out not to be a virgin, he is supposed to kill her on her father's doorstep. I think it's safe to say that Jews, throughout the ages, chose to ignore this passage. Why? Because it makes no sense. That's why. And take a look at the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. That's a trip if ever I took one. And what about the "72 virgins" in Islam? If I'm not mistaken it's a mistake in translation. It's really "72 white raisins."

Why do I bring into question the legitimacy of religious belief? Am I against religion? No. I consider religion as a legitimate pathway to God. But as with all other pathways; we need to stick to the path to get to where we're going. And when we sense that we're heading in the wrong direction, we check our compass to get back on track. And to my mind, the best and only compass we have, when it really comes down to it, is the universal moral compass of Common Sense.

Because so much is on the line, we may no longer be able to afford the luxury of false belief, whether religious, or any other belief, for that matter. False belief will embolden us to go to war for the wrong reasons. We may have been able to get away with it in the past, but only at the expense of scores of millions of corpses left behind in the wake of false ideologies. But the potential devastation of modern weaponry makes the consequences of false belief too costly to bear.

And so, I submit to you, for your consideration, the possibility that there is only one source for legitimate belief, and that is our shared notion of Common Sense. If an idea makes sense to you, then believe in it. If it doesn't, then let it go. We can no longer afford to let the accident of birth, or the content of scripture, or the persuasiveness of religious leaders, to convince us of the truth, when deep down we know that the truth is to be found elsewhere.

As between reason and faith, I prefer to believe in what makes sense. And I have come to believe that only through the language of Common Sense does God actually talk to us. The rest is pretense. And pretense will give us only the semblance of truth, but never the real thing.