On Faith
I find the topic of religious faith incredibly interesting. I was reading
Religion Beat Became a Test of Faith and was reminded of something by the following paragraph.
Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence. And there’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.
I’ve had the great fortune to have been befriended by some wonderfully intelligent priests in my life and our conversations invariable touch on faith as conscious act. My mother often speaks of her faith as an enterprise of great effort as I suspect many faithful feel. If I recall correctly, Dawkins has described faith as requiring a critical suspension of intellectual faculties. In fact, I recall being told that the attempt to apply the human intellect to understanding faith, god, etc., is an ultimately futile endeavor as the human intellect was designed specifically to not understand these things. I personally would be profoundly disappointed if the whole story were true- if god created man is his own image, required man to worship god, but did not provide man with the faculties to understand god. I believe that conversation ended with some explanation of intellect being a tool of the devil or some such.
The point, though, is that faith is extremely interesting. I’ve watched some seem to draw from a bottomless well while others believe it to not exist. I’m particularly interested in the point that Dawkins et al. make about the inherent dangers of faith. Specifically, as the argument goes, uncritical thinking and denial of evidence which contradicts the message of the faithful, often in willful ignorance, are extremely dangerous. Certainly, many would argue that the faith of fundamentalist Islamic martyrs angling for a boatload of virgins in heaven is dangerous. The relationship between poverty, education, and faith is a fascinating topic, too.
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