But what do you believe?

What I believe and what I know seems to be two very different things.  There have been books and seminars on believing ourselves rich and beautiful and successful.  There are religions in which believing is the most important thing they teach.  Believing can create magick, save fairies, and start an industrial empire.
But what does belief have to do with everyday life?
Everything.  Just Everything.  Let me tell a story about beliefs.
I work with a woman that is strong in her faith, very religious, and very vocal about anyone not living according to the rules of her faith.  She is also very narrow in her views and judgemental about just about everything and certain about what is right and wrong to the point of self-righteousness.
She also has no idea that is annoying to anyone else---because she is right.  (she takes black and white thinking way beyond concrete)
Recently, she decided to take a problem she was having to the whole department because she didn't know what to do.  It was a personal problem involving a newly married son and his new wife.  She presented her side--when she and her spouse got married, instead of having their christmas day at either parents, all the families from both sides came to her house and spent from early morning to evening.  All her spouse's family and all her family---I resisted asking if they were both only children.  And the problem was that the son and his new wife were going to spend the holidays at her family.  She thought the wife's family should all come to their house as they always had.  She was in tears, but the word wrong was used.  I asked why both families didn't go to the newlyweds home.  She started crying.
Their was no sympathy in the department meeting, we had all experienced tradition changes at our own marriages and with our grown children.  But she had somehow assigned a very real Right and Wrong to her little family tradition and somehow had expected us to tell her how to make her son and his new family tow the line.
Belief.
To talk about god or metaphysics or spirituality without the use of the word is almost impossible.  But our beliefs are not limited to those things that can't be proven by science.  We develop opinions, tastes, desires and styles based on beliefs.  If you ask three people what is beauty you will get very concrete answers most of the time, but beauty is an intangible determined by each of us and what we believe is beautiful has a great deal to do with it.  Most young girls in the USA know that the disney princesses are beautiful.  Every clear eyed adult knows that no human has ever looked like those cartoons.  But those caricatures of young women do give girls something to believe about what makes a beautiful woman--they must be young, clear-skinned, perfect hair, pert noses, big eyes, with no asymmetries, fatness, handicaps.
Little girls pick their most beautiful feature based on such things and they hate the feature that gets them made fun of, either by others or by their own mirror.
Every judgement is based on a belief.  Whether we are judging ourselves, others, or a system.  And beliefs are generally developed without conscious thought.  We are indoctrinated to them as children, by our parent's teaching us their beliefs with the certainty of fact. by the religious system our parents choose for us and take us to, by the schools we attend, by the entertainment we watch and listen to and read, and by the people outside our family that spend the most time talking to us and teaching us.  They aren't just spiritual, we are taught what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, what is popular and unpopular, what is important and what is trite, what is worth fighting for and what is ridiculous.
And for most kids, that process ends when they graduate from high school.  If you run into an old classmate 50 years later, they are still sporting the same tan lines and extra-straight long blonde hair, they are going to the same church, and when they open their mouth, you hear the same opinions spouted as truths--gossip about people not doing what she expects, party-line politics, and judgements about the earth going to hell-in-a-handbasket because of all those people that aren't living the right way.
Socrates, the king of questions, said the unexamined life is not worth living.  Have we stopped teaching that, or has it always been so rare for people to try to see beyond the blindspots.  Listening to toddlers parrot their parents is not unexpected, but listening to 30-somethings do the same is very scarey.  And that is not rare.  A part of me feels that we have not encouraged thoughtfulness--critical thinking--call it what you want.  Another part recognizes that getting past beliefs is hard.  It takes consciously recognizing them as beliefs.  It requires looking at them without emotional buy-in.
Every time I see a person that is upset because the church of their childhood will not accept them due to their sexuality or due to a divorce, I wonder why they don't find another religion.  Why stay with one that condemns you for something you do not feel is wrong or that was not even a choice.  But the three people I have asked that of respond with statements of simplicity---"they are the true church"  Wow!
I was raised to have strong religious beliefs as a child.  Neither parent did much in the way of questioning, although neither were terribly close to the church by their deaths.  I questioned, and the first questions were pretty mild next to the questions that came later.  In the end, I decided that my spiritual beliefs would remain fluid and treated as beliefs--not as unprovable facts.  I no longer get into discussions of god with true-believers.  It is pointless.  Most traditional religions have the strange caveat about belief being the most important thing.  The act of examining it places your soul in danger.  I'm far to paranoid to think that was ever part of anything but a human attempt to make other people do what they are told.
But is there a way to change our beliefs about other things.  Can my daughter love her nonstraight and nonblonde hair?  Can I learn to love my decidedly old and convex face?  Should all plastic surgeries be covered by regular insurance?  And success?  How do we redefine it?  How do we make it ok to be who we are?  How do we examine those things in our lives that we have turned into truths based on beliefs.
What do you believe?