Polanyi observed that "Since the sceptic does not consider it rational to doubt what he himself believes, the advocacy of 'rational doubt' is merely the sceptic's way of advocating his own beliefs".
This sounds like the typical theist's semantic trick of trying to posit non-belief as a belief. Sort of like those chicks who chirp "Even not having an agenda is a kind of agenda." But being able to phrase it in such a way as to try and make it look like a belief system doesn't actually make it so.
Humorously, you've just done the very thing you've claimed to dismiss in others. To say that "being able to phrase it in such a way as to try and make it look like a belief system doesn't actually make it so" begs the question. Saying
anything doesn't make it so, whatever the "it" happens to be. But implying that this fact means that the
opposite of what is said
is true is equally faulty.
Of
course "rational doubt" and atheism are belief systems, unless you have defined "belief system" in a limited way to mean "a system of belief in a being, the existence of which depends on no other being, that is ontologically discontinuous from nature and without the agency of which nature would not exist." Using that definition, neither Hinduism nor Buddhism are "belief systems."
You appear to be saying that because you, as an individual, are denying the tenets of a belief system--basically theism, specifically Christianity--your non-belief is the antithesis of the belief system and, thus, is not itself an example of a belief system; inasmuch as belief goes with belief system, your non-belief must be a non-belief non-system.
You speak of some "typical theist" trying to make one thing look like another. That charge could just as easily be laid at the feet of atheist debunkers who also try to make one thing look like another: "You say this, but we all know that your religion is nothing more than the rationalization of self-interest, the desire of a priesthood to prey on gullible dupes, the justification of intolerance to women, the tool by which the ruling class maintains its subjugation of the lower classes, the projection of psychological derangements, a wish-fulfillment because of a fear of death, the inability to see things as they really are, pie in the sky by and by, the opiate of the masses."
That some belief systems, such as dialectical materialism, attract a much larger number of adherents than others, such as Swedenborgianism, of course, has nothing necessarily to say about the truth or falsity of any of them. For example, lots of people, highly educated people, believed in phlogiston, but that didn't make it exist. Disbelieving in it didn't make it cease to exist or make something else to exist that also seemed to explain experience in the way the belief in phlogiston had seemed to. Regardless, though, of what is accepted as fact, the smallest possible unit of a "belief system" is the individual. Without the individual's assent to, for whatever reason, the elements of the larger belief system, there could be no larger belief system.
So the smallest possible example of a theistic belief system would be an
individual saying something like this:
A. "I believe, based on my experience (which may be incomplete) and my reasoning (which may be incorrect), that nature and especially man's ability to reason and to distinguish between truth and error are insufficient causes of themselves and that they must, therefore, have both their material and personal/intellectual sources in a being whose nature is sufficient to explain both nature as a contingent whole and man's ability, though he is a part of that contingent whole, to use reason in a non-contingent fashion to arrive at conclusions about nature and human nature that are demonstrably rather than only apparently true.*
Against that, we could have something like this:
B. "I believe, based on my experience (which may be incomplete) and my reasoning (which may be incorrect), that nature and especially man's ability to reason and to distinguish between truth and error are sufficient causes of themselves and that they have as both their material and personal/intellectual sources nothing other than nature itself, which is sufficient to explain both nature as a contingent whole and man's ability, though he is a part of that contingent whole, to use reason in a non-contingent fashion to arrive at conclusions about nature and human nature that are demonstrably rather than only apparently true.*
It's self-serving to claim that B is
not a belief system but that A is because A posits the existence of a cause of nature that is extra-natural, a dualist rather than monist philosophy. The reason for the claim, though, is understandable. He who will admit that both are belief systems writ small must also admit that he is like everyone else, not a special "bright" person, a member of the cognoscenti, an insider who knows the
real story, unlike those poor chirping chicks who use semantic tricks to posit things. This is just human nature, as attested to by groups (whether tribal, linguistic, religious, or political) throughout history claiming for themselves the title of human and denying it to those outside their group. It also means that the possibility of being wrong carries with it more serious and unequal consequences: if the theist is wrong, he is ultimately no worse off than the a-theist. If the a-theist is wrong, well...
"Yeah, yeah, I know, Pascal's wager," a friend of mine said in high school after getting to this same point. "Well, I'm a hedonist and I like it that way."
She agreed at last with Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's Bulldog, who was quoted as saying, "The only alternative to evolution is special creation, which is clearly unthinkable."
Though some people may say now that they have adopted a monist, naturalistic worldview because it's just a matter of fact, it's instructive to go back and look at the writings of the early proponents of the belief system called naturalism and see how happy they were that it provided them, like my hedonist friend, a way of getting out from under the idea of moral responsibility to a transcendent God who created everything.
*without which "truth" is only a label that claims "I'm right and you're wrong," a symbolic version of the
argumentum ad baculum made by a ghost in the machine.