FAITH AND BELIEF

Faith — I do not have faith in a god (God) or heaven, in the sense of these things being either “true” or “false.” All of these things/places may exist but I have no idea. Concerning religious doctrines, I don’t approach them on the level of thinking that they are either literally true or absolutely false. I see religious/spiritual stories and doctrines as existing more on the imaginative and psychic plane. These realities speak to the imaginative and creative principle that seems to be a part of my psychic make up.

I sometimes think about faith in the following way. Let us take the question “Do I have faith that the sun will rise?” I take it for granted. When I think about the phenomenon of the sun rising I realize that for a variety of reasons the sun could not rise over the earth (if a meteor obliterates the earth). I suppose my normally unquestioned belief, due to repeatedly experiencing the sun rising, that the sun will rise is a faith of sorts but this seems like a very shaky and impoverished way to define faith. This seems more like habituation and assumption and some would certainly argue that this is what faith in religious ideas/beliefs are, i.e., that people have faith in beliefs due to familial and cultural conditioning which have no evidence which can prove them true or false.

The best definition I have for faith is that when I move into an unknown and/or uncomfortable situation/mental-emotional state, that if I act from my heart/intuition things will work out despite my fears to the contrary. Faith is the impetus to move forward with something when it goes against what I know and am comfortable with. I can’t say that this faith leads me to believe that everything will take place the way I hope it will but that I will likely be okay when I act in a way that is counter intuitive to my conditioning. In this way, faith is related to courage for me. At a certain point when the particular unknown is no longer as scary and mysterious as it once was, I leave behind that particular need for faith and courage which I needed in a given situation, because now I am familiar with the situation and have inner resources that help me deal with that situation with more ease. Yet, there are always new situations which challenge what I am comfortable with and it is this “faith” and “courage” which again compel me to move into the unknown and uncomfortable.

Belief — Belief is another difficult topic. I have issues with the idea of concrete belief in a particular idea, doctrine, or person. My experience of life is that my mind is in constant flux. Ideas change from one moment to the next. To latch on to a particular concept or doctrine as unshakably true makes no sense to my experience of life. So, one way I would define belief is professing the truth of a particular mental-emotional idea/complex, or set of ideas, as literally and unshakably true. In this sense, once I start to use my powers of reasoning, I find that I am a skeptic.

Concerning a topic such as the belief in God (or angels or demons), I think of belief in black and white terms. Either it (God) is real, objectively true and correct or it is false. In that sense, belief is not very interesting to me when it comes to religious topics. I would say that the idea of God is a very powerful symbol with a long and interesting history. It means something, many things in fact, in different parts of the world. The idea of God is part of our culture and worldview, as it is part of my personal mental-emotional experience and history. The idea of God has a psychic importance.