ON FAITH
We all need and seek to believe that there is value, meaning, and purpose in life, that our individual lives matter and are important in the scheme of things. The major purpose of religion is provide a way of attaining and holding this faith. Thus faith is the foundation of religion and the reason for its existence. That, I believe, is the answer to the meta question of why we have religions in the first place.
Because we have difficulty exercising pure faith free of an existential basis, historical facts and physical icons become important, if not necessary, to sustain faith. Most of us, being small minded, tend to confuse the icons with the reality we seek, which is faith. To develop and maintain this faith, we seek concrete, historical facts, and we will obtain these "facts" one way or another, either by construing history to suit our purposes, or by making up stories that provide the "facts" we require. In making what is actually a dishonest transition from need to fact, we put the stories we invent ahead of the faith that drives the need for them.
If faith is the primary objective and need, then a search for a historically true set of events establishing a particular religion is unnecessary. The stories of Jesus or Mohammed or Yahweh and questions of whether and how they lived or otherwise existed are not intrinsic to faith. Faith comes first. Faith is primary; stories are secondary. The doctrines of specific religions are examples of stories that support faith and to put the stories ahead of faith is to put the cart before the horse.
This common inversion of story and faith, I think, goes a long way in explaining the enormous conflict between adherents of different stories. We forget that stories are but a means to an end, a way of anchoring our faith, which is the same for all peoples, in something we can see and feel. If we could go back to the source of religious beliefs, to the basic need for faith in the value and meaning of life, we could remove much of the sectarian strife that now dominates human experience the world over.
We will not do it, of course. Human minds are too small and mean to allow such intellectual and spiritual development to take place.
Because we have difficulty exercising pure faith free of an existential basis, historical facts and physical icons become important, if not necessary, to sustain faith. Most of us, being small minded, tend to confuse the icons with the reality we seek, which is faith. To develop and maintain this faith, we seek concrete, historical facts, and we will obtain these "facts" one way or another, either by construing history to suit our purposes, or by making up stories that provide the "facts" we require. In making what is actually a dishonest transition from need to fact, we put the stories we invent ahead of the faith that drives the need for them.
If faith is the primary objective and need, then a search for a historically true set of events establishing a particular religion is unnecessary. The stories of Jesus or Mohammed or Yahweh and questions of whether and how they lived or otherwise existed are not intrinsic to faith. Faith comes first. Faith is primary; stories are secondary. The doctrines of specific religions are examples of stories that support faith and to put the stories ahead of faith is to put the cart before the horse.
This common inversion of story and faith, I think, goes a long way in explaining the enormous conflict between adherents of different stories. We forget that stories are but a means to an end, a way of anchoring our faith, which is the same for all peoples, in something we can see and feel. If we could go back to the source of religious beliefs, to the basic need for faith in the value and meaning of life, we could remove much of the sectarian strife that now dominates human experience the world over.
We will not do it, of course. Human minds are too small and mean to allow such intellectual and spiritual development to take place.
posted by Jerry at 10:25 AM
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