The One About Faith

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."     

These words are found in the treatise to the Hebrews in the New Testament, and just to piss off the evangelicals and fundamentalists, I will not give the chapter and verse.  My opinion of chapter and verse references is that if you are so ignorant of the bible that you cannot recognize it when you hear it, then you are a piss poor student of the damn thing and not worth my time in the first place.  That out of the way, let's return our attention to the words above.

Any commentary you read will have all kinds of qualifying and backtracking remarks about this text, because on the surface, it seems to say that faith is substantial and is evidence.  Yet, most of us who haven't completely closed our minds to the realities of the universe can see quite clearly that faith is the antithesis of substance and evidence, especially the evidence bit.  Believers in the heavenly bogey man have been and still are quite proud of the fact that they have faith in the presence of no evidence.  They believe without a single substantial element of reason, and they find it both pious and noble to do so.  But the human mind, in my opinion, cannot live with that irrational insanity without stress somewhere along the seams.  

The human mind needs to make connections that give structure and order to the world around us. We need to see that the chair has four legs before we sit on it.  We need evidence before we act.  When someone calls out at home, "It's snowing!" what's the first thing we do?  We look out the window for ourselves to verify the report, not with cynicism, but just because it's our natural reaction.  That marvelous characteristic is what protects us and keeps us alive and well. 

So why is it in every other aspect of human life, people need evidence before they act, yet when it comes to some of the craziest non sequiturs in human history, some people are willing to believe them fully, devotedly, and militantly?  For example, they say "something" must have made the universe.  Granted, "something" might have, but how to you get from "something" to the Apostle's Creed without a lot of making stuff up along the way?  Why do you believe what was written in a book a long time ago by people you didn't know?  How do you know they weren't lying? How do you know they didn't misunderstand events?  You don't know.  You simply chose to believe what someone told you, and you discovered that absolving yourself of all responsibility to think and reason for yourself makes you feel kind of good, a little euphoric, so you call that euphoria the "holy spirit" and there you have it!  A ready-made "inner witness", something the rest of us call circular logic.

The fact is, faith has no substance.  It is certainly not evidence of anything except maybe gullibility.  We all know that if there were actually evidence of anything the religious authorities try to push on us then the need for faith would disappear.  In the face of evidence, faith no longer exists.  To me, that means faith has no place in the human mind. To believe something stupid simply because I am told to believe is itself blatant stupidity.  If we apply to religious nuttery the same tests of substance and evidence we apply to all else, then we should easily and quickly see that religion is nothing but an illusion, or a delusion.

Photo: by Rembrandt, who is dead, so I'm using his painting of the Apostle for decoration. 

The one about Christ

When I was a christian, the ultimate guiding principle of my life was the life of Christ as revealed in the New Testament.  I was one of those guys who always had a pocket New Testament, not for show, but because I really believed in it.  I always read it when circumstances gave me spare time.  I was ridiculed by some in school because of my habit of pulling out my New Testament as soon as my ass hit a chair.  At one point in my life, I would have taken a bet that I could have quoted in order most of the New Testament.  In my mind, the New Testament was explicitly how God wanted his disciples to live.  The New Testament was expressly the word of God, and Jesus was the very presence of God in the flesh, and that made Christ the only model of life for believers.  Everything Christ taught both explicitly and implicitly became the only goal of my life.  It was the only possible way to live.  As far as I was concerned, God did not sanction any other way of looking at things.  The way of Christ was the only way God approved of.  I couldn't understand anyone who thought otherwise.  The whole world around me was seen through the eyes of Christ.  It was, therefore, impossible for me to ignore the poor, to disregard the helpless, to stand off from the needy.

When I realized, eventually, that right-wing partisans also claimed Christ, I was flabbergasted.  To me, it was impossible to be a follower of Christ and not believe in workers' rights, care for the poor and needy, equality of the races, respect for women, and social reform for the good of the community.  To realize that some whom I called brethren in the faith were working hard against the Christ of the New Testament purely to satisfy their own political or socio-economic agenda was disheartening to say the least.  However, it helped the light to dawn on me that very few people who claimed Christ actually revered and followed his path.  Even though time and experience taught me that religion is nonsense and christianism is a lie, that earlier devotion to the life of Christ somehow lingered within me.  I no longer believe Jesus was anything more than a carefully constructed myth, but what the myth stood for in real, personal terms has stuck with me.  I can talk about Christ and look up to him as though he had been real and continue to model my life on his example by not shunning the downtrodden, not turning my back on the needy, not refusing to help the poor, and not giving in to the liars who claim Christ yet do everything in their power to emasculate what he stands for.  Why?  It doesn't matter whether a real god-man savior existed or not.  What matters is we exist now and can save the world if we choose to.  It doesn't matter if there is a heaven or not; what matters is doing the right thing now.  If you claim Christ, and you reject what he stands for, how do you explain yourself?  How do you get off exalting your culture, your business, your banks above your Christ?  You probably believe he existed and believe that he will be your judge at the end of time.  You, then, of all people should be wary of acting against him.  I wonder at your kind.