What should we believe?

Ah… the good old topic of epistemology… what is the philosophy of justified belief if not a rich battleground of ideas that has been raging these past thousand generations or so and is by no means settled?

Well, I’m going to propose here for Disqusion a method to determine, to the first order of magnitude, at a first approximation, whether you should believe a thing or not…
… but to be clear, we’re not talking about whether your little brother pinched your Mum’s last cookie or anything personal or individual to you, we’re talking about what we might describe as “public knowledge”… facts about reality such as that germs and parasites cause diseases, or that the Earth is an oblate spheroid, or that Paris is the capital of France, or that YHWH/Christ incarnated to tell Jews how naughty they were and that they should jolly well lay down their arms and follow Roman statutes and pay taxes to Caesar, or that Allah/YHWH has dictated that the flesh of anybody who offends Him by doing things like joining things to Him (such as thinking of Him as Christ/YHWH) will be forever refreshed to burn again and again forevermore…

So… what’s the method? Loosely expressed it’s as simple as this: if more than 50% of the population of Planet Earth believe it, accept it; if less than 50% of the population of Planet Earth believe it, reject it.

Now… I don’t suggest that this should be a hard and fast rule… but I would suggest that if you are going to break with it you’d be insane to do so without knowing that you were doing so… you should only ever consciously break that rule and you ought to possess a good reason so to do.

Do more than half the World believe that God literally gave Moses His Laws?
Do more than half the World believe that the Christian Hell is real and most Muslims will be going there?
Do more than half the World believe that the Muslim Hell is real and most Christians will be going there?
Do more than half the World believe that Noah built a big boat when he was about to enter his seventh century of life?
Do more than half the World believe that one can gain mystical insight by following some rules religiously and meditating lots?
Do more than half the World believe that your star sign governs your fate?
Do more than half the World believe in ghosts?

I think it’s fairly safe to say that the answer to all those questions is “no”… although that last one is getting closer to a “yes” than any before it…

But what about you? What beliefs do you have that less than half the population of Planet Earth share? Do you have good reason to hold those beliefs?

Do you think that it’s a pretty good starting point for what you should believe or am I falling foul of the Ad Populum Fallacy?