What is a "belief system"?

Good question.

But one which James Carse does an awful job of answering here (via Andrew Sullivan).

Take a snapshot of the conflicts around the world: Sunnis vs. Shiites, Israelis vs. Palestinians, Serbs vs. Kosovars, Indians vs. Pakistanis. They seem to be driven by religious hatred. It's enough to make you wonder if the animosity would melt away if all religions were suddenly, somehow, to vanish into the ether. But James Carse doesn't see them as religious conflicts at all. To him, they are battles over rival belief systems, which may or may not have religious overtones.

Well, no shit, human conflict will always arise from rival belief systems. What makes religious conflicts so maddening is that, since they have no rational justification, they can not be resolved with rational discourse.

To Carse, religion is all about longevity; it's what unites people over the millennia.

Yes, just as slavery and the flat Earth theory united us over millennia. It was too bad to see those go.

He goes on to make the requisite reference to Nazism.

A belief system is meant to be a comprehensive network of ideas about what one thinks is absolutely real and true. Within that system, everything is adequately explained and perfectly reasonable. You know exactly how far to go with your beliefs and when to stop your thinking. A belief system is defined by an absolute authority. The authority can be a text or an institution or a person. So it's very important to understand a belief system as independent of religion. After all, Marxism and Nazism were two of the most powerful belief systems ever.

I agree that belief systems are worst when they are dogmatic and doubters are punished. And a system does not have to be theistic to satisfy these criteria. But it does have to flow from an authority who can not be questioned, and God fits that bill for most.

Based on this strict definition of "belief system" I would agree that all belief systems are bad. But I think it's a definition contrived to make his point. Why does a belief system have to dictate beliefs? Instead of giving answers, why can it not offer guidelines for finding the answers, and changing them when conflicting evidence arises?

A few good ones that come to mind:

• The golden rule, and its more complete cousin, Kant's Categorical Imperative.
  
• Carl Sagan's excellent Baloney Detection Kit (note "argument from authority" is the 2nd item under "common fallacies of logic and rhetoric").
• The scientific method.

Of course the problem with all of these is that they don't offer a simple set of rules for what to eat, whom to marry, how to manage one's resources, or how to spend Sunday morning. They're a base platform. One has to spend some energy building more specific ethics on top of them.

But, those who start from a base like this will have a common ground on which to defend their beliefs and resolve conflicts. Not so with faith-based beliefs.