We cannot step outside belief altogether.
The point is that from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don't talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue.
Willoughby wrote that her "strength and worth are not dependent on outside belief," and that "the truth exists whether the president accepts it or not". .
Once we give priority to an outside belief, a belief we have chosen from the smorgasbord of beliefs we come upon in life, we have ended our ability to exercise free choice except to choose another belief.
At the next layer, what I have labeled a mature elder, we discover we are still giving our power to a second thing, an outside belief, when we no longer believe there is a second thing to receive our power.
I may have freely chosen this "outside belief," as I now call it, and therefore think I am still free to exercise my ability and right of individual free choice each moment going forward.
Some of the giants of American politics fell well outside conventional beliefs.
These were singled out because they are believed to prevent the "implantation of a human embryo after its fertilization," which is morally outside the beliefs of the companies' founders.
Suggestion from the outside, internal beliefs and expectations, and psycho-pathological context are deeply influenced by any therapeutic proposition.
If this claim is right, it undercuts the suggestion that we can step outside our beliefs to arrive at some more objective form of justification.
