An introduction

[paintscribe]

Ever since hearing Evid3nc3’s journey out of faith, I was inspired to look at it the same way. I have had difficulties with my parent’s questions, since they want to know why? As if there is any one thing they can refute and bring me back to the fold. The idea of listing out all the “evidence” out there felt dishonest, because it wasn’t just facts

Comments

[reverancepavane]

Many people confuse faith and belief. It is probably because they have been brought up in the mistaken belief [if you will excuse the expression] that the are the same thing. But I've found that they are not. I've encountered many people with deep and profound personal faith and many people who simply believe.* About many things, not just about religion (of which they have belonged to several).
You see one of the doctrines of faith, which would be perfectly understandable to a medieval Christian scholar, but foreign to anyone untrained or unread in theology, is that unquestioned faith is, for all practical purposes, worthless. For faith to have any value it must be constantly questioned. Tested, if you will. But somehow the whole idea of free will, something that was so vitally important to early Judeo-Christian thought, has been lost, in favour of simple belief. After all belief can be pure. It is unquestioned and unexamined. It raises no doubts.
But people aren't pure. They are human. Flawed and vulnerable. Their very humanity contaminates their belief, infects it with a lack of purity. Until, unless they wilfully turn a hypocritical blind eye to it, they can no longer have faith in it.** Those previously marbled pillars are perceived to be frangible chalk, which cannot bear the load any more. Which becomes to many the crisis of faith.
Faith can survive this revelation. Belief cannot hope to.
[Is faith good or evil? It, like the neopagan idea of magick, is neither. It is the intent it is dedicated to that is good or evil. And because most people, in their own minds at least, prefer to think of themselves as good, this is how they think of their faith. But what is true for one person is almost definitely not true for another. Which is why faith is an intensely personal thing.]
Anyway, thankyou for sharing your journey. It is always interesting to hear such things (not to mention that discussing them is often a useful method of staying warm each winter). One hopes that your parents will one day understand too. Unfortunately it is not a thing that can be readily explained, as it is too intensely personal.***
* And also people that hope. Hope is a powerful thing. For example, I hope that someday humanity will finally grow up and put aside childish things. But I don't have any expectation (or faith) that this will occur. At least, not within the next few millenia or so. We are all still selfish and petulant children.
** Whether one can have faith in one's blindness raises intriguing philosophical questions...
*** And in fairness I should add that I am neither a believer nor truly faithful. I have my Goddesses, who are great comfort to me in times of trouble, because I know they can always be relied upon to make things far worse... [And no, they don't exist as anything beyond my own creations, my own personal primitive anthropomorphisation of the scarey large and implacably hostile universe that seems to be demanded by my primitive reptile-descended human brain. But that doesn't mean I don't love them both dearly. ]