Proud to Have Faith

Reflecting upon an item I see on Street Articles called "Proud To Be A Faithless Heathen" , I can perceive a self-assured but sadly arrogant individualist. There is nothing wrong with logic per se, except when an individual, with a small range of subjectivity, begins to maintain that he or she has got the whole of it, along with, I presume, "The Truth." Logic should be our vade mecum but it should not cover over our hearts.

I deem Adolph Hitler as an example of an individual whose reliance on a specific (ill-founded) logic allowed his heart to be completely suppressed. Surely there is danger to encourage any and all individuals to abandon traditional faith and pursue their own brands of logic. No, people need a blueprint for ideals for behavior that can be provided by faithfulness.

One big trouble that the author of the article has recognized in the progress of history is the misuse of faith. Faith should not be invoked to trump logic any more than logic should be invoked to trump faith. But what is faith? Personally I see faith as largely misunderstood. Faith is not knowledge, but many will rely upon faith as if it were. This is the primary danger inherent in religions of all sorts. It is potentially a disaster of semantics. I am deeply hesitant to start any sentence with the words, "I believe..." This is because I want to be very careful about what I believe and what I need to have faith in. NO ONE can tell me with absolute certainty what I should have faith in--not a priest, not a preacher, not an imam, not an avatar, not a pope. But I should seek Truth, and perhaps in those places where those same authorities are pointing to.

Faith is a choice. I choose God. I do not choose to have the faith that there is no God, such as Nietzsche's belief. His beliefs set him free from the moralities ingrained in him during his very young years. His freedom led him to an early death due to venereal disease--not very logical at all. Humans have many natural tendencies that are very difficult to defer by logic, such as revenge, greed, and slothfulness. I can assure the reader that, in my many years of teaching, I have found few successes in using logical arguments against these vices that I have recognized in my students. Heart-felt arguments tend to work much better.

The author quoted the famous saying "God works in mysterious ways." Avoiding any logical argument for rejecting this statement, he simply shunts the words aside, saying "even a first-grader wouldn't fall for" [that explanation]. Funny, I must, I suppose, confess my stupidity because I fell for that explanation as a first-grader, and I fall for it now as a senior adult. Humans do have great capacities for huge depth of great understandings. But one person's mind cannot hold the entirety of truth and logic. We all need, and rely upon, the whole experience of civilizations that preceded us. Personally, I do not bother my little brain about whether God has a mind that can hold all that, I just accept that God does work in ways that are beyond a human's capacity. I find "heathen" irreverence akin to the shallow ethnocentrism of by-gone ages. It's a by-product of a dangerous combination of small-mindedness and overblown pride. (Talk about condescending!) Tradition does have something to offer (and, yes, some things to reject by logic). Individualists should stop presuming and accept their own personal limitations.