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Blind Faith? Part I
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There’s a lot of talk in spiritual and religious circles about this thing called faith. It seems that faith is required for everything from happiness to health to this thing called abundance or prosperity. And when the preacher or teacher can offer up no proof for his or her ideologies, they invoke ‘blind faith,’ which is usually a catchall for any and every question that there just doesn’t seem to be an answer for. Blind faith is also used by many who would like to manipulate us to do their bidding, usually under the pretense of religious ‘duty.’
But is faith blind? Is faith anything at all?
Merriam-Webster defines faith as 1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing: 2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. It’s the second definition that requires us to take a second look. If faith is a belief that doesn’t rest in logic or proof, then what, if anything, does it rest in?
So at the onset, faith appears to be a belief. Ironically, most beliefs run independently of logical proof and operate based on their own criteria. So what separates faith from any other belief? Aren’t beliefs themselves some sort of faith?
This four-part series will address faith and beliefs and culminate with another look faith not as a belief, but as that ‘knowing’ that many have described, whether they come from a spiritual background or not.
Since faith looks like ‘belief,’ then let’s start there. What is a belief? Again, Merriam-Webster: 1: a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing; 2: a conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence…
That particular definition looks an awful lot like the previous definition of faith.
To simplify, beliefs are simply ‘generalizations’ we make about the world around us. This would probably not include everything though. For example, if someone asked you if you believed in gravity, what would you say? What would you do if this same person asked you if you believed in electricity? You’d probably dismiss them with a simple “duh!” These are facts, experiences: the world is round, what goes up must come down, the Earth orbits around the sun. They’re things that we simply know because they are. We may develop beliefs around them, like ‘gravity is the reason I’m gaining weight,’ or ‘lightning is created when angels go streaking,’ but the concept is ‘known’ to us.
No, beliefs are based on opinion, which is a judgment or appraisal: ‘Brad and Jennifer were such a great couple,’ ‘If you want something done, you have to do it yourself,’ ‘I’ll never lose that extra ten pounds.’ Still other beliefs are not based on facts at all. Those are the beliefs into which religion and spirituality fall.
Beliefs are complex things and they hate to be challenged. When we create a belief we create a defense for that belief simultaneously. A simple metaphor for this is the building of a castle. A castle is built for the main purpose of keeping its inhabitants safe from invasion, so the very building of the castle is in itself a defense. Beliefs are like that. They are built to help us make sense of the world and to localize the world, and to do that, they must also “protect” us from the “real” world.
We don’t even create all of our beliefs. Some of them are imposed upon us: by our families, teachers, friends, neighbors, the society in which we live. If pressed, we’d probably not even be able to identify where most of our beliefs even came from or why we chose to adopt them.
In the next post, we’re going to look at beliefs, where they ‘reside’ and how they function, and we’ll consider where faith and beliefs diverge and at what level faith goes from being a belief to being experiential.
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