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I'm starting a new tradition, where I pick a word starting with F and talk about it on Fridays. Last week I chose flirt. This week's contestant? Faith.
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I look at faith mostly in a religious sense: faith in God, faith in your religion of choice. A lot of people talked about their faith and beliefs in a series of posts recently. Common among them was a rejection of organized religion for a more free form, personalized spirituality. The details of such a belief were pretty vague and far between. This seems to fly in the face of reason to me. I have a hard time accepting a religion or belief system without rules or rituals. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism. All of the major world religions have a belief structure, hierarchy of sorts, a mythology. They are a spiritual discipline, through which you can achieve a relationship with God. Modern spiritualism seeks to cut that all away in favor of a personal relationship unclouded by rules or dogma. But it sounds like a cop out to me, no offense. Faith isn't easy, its hard. It's painful at times. It's accepting that sometimes bad things happen to good people. That your grandfather gets killed in a car crash and a serial rapist walks free. That you aren't at the center of the universe, that things will happen that you can't understand and you can't hold anyone accountable for it. People have wrestled with concepts of good and evil, God or no God, from the beginning of time, and will still be debating it when the universe ends. No answers will be coming. Nothing that doesn't require you to make a leap beyond logic at some point. Nothing that doesn't require faith in the end to solve.
All that being said, I think my faith is pretty eroded these days. Too much time away from the Church, perhaps. Too much time not thinking about it. Too much time considering every side of the issue, and then getting paralyzed while I sit on the fence. Impaled on it, in the end. The realization that your religion may be nothing more real than the stories of Zeus or Ra. I hit me the most when I started doubting the existence of an afterlife. That sudden sinking feeling that there would be no reward for living a good life in the end, for enduring the trials and tribulations and injustices we face every day. And oddly, there would be no punishment for my crimes, if I chose to commit them. I could do whatever I wanted, and only be accountable to natural and federal law.
It crushed me. Because if good and evil and morals are all just fabrications, then why follow any one over the other? Why follow them at all? We would just be living a lie, pretending to be something other than what we are: animals. Beasts.
But I guess I don't really think that. Because somewhere in my core is still the belief, drilled in by many years of church and catholic school, and later process and accepted by myself, in the hope of something better. That something is out there, that we can draw strength from, or comfort. And even if it isn't there, our belief, our faith, can make it so. You can will God into existence... or out of it.
All right, this is starting to sound like a Mage game discussion, so I'm ending it here.
( Read more... )
I look at faith mostly in a religious sense: faith in God, faith in your religion of choice. A lot of people talked about their faith and beliefs in a series of posts recently. Common among them was a rejection of organized religion for a more free form, personalized spirituality. The details of such a belief were pretty vague and far between. This seems to fly in the face of reason to me. I have a hard time accepting a religion or belief system without rules or rituals. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism. All of the major world religions have a belief structure, hierarchy of sorts, a mythology. They are a spiritual discipline, through which you can achieve a relationship with God. Modern spiritualism seeks to cut that all away in favor of a personal relationship unclouded by rules or dogma. But it sounds like a cop out to me, no offense. Faith isn't easy, its hard. It's painful at times. It's accepting that sometimes bad things happen to good people. That your grandfather gets killed in a car crash and a serial rapist walks free. That you aren't at the center of the universe, that things will happen that you can't understand and you can't hold anyone accountable for it. People have wrestled with concepts of good and evil, God or no God, from the beginning of time, and will still be debating it when the universe ends. No answers will be coming. Nothing that doesn't require you to make a leap beyond logic at some point. Nothing that doesn't require faith in the end to solve.
All that being said, I think my faith is pretty eroded these days. Too much time away from the Church, perhaps. Too much time not thinking about it. Too much time considering every side of the issue, and then getting paralyzed while I sit on the fence. Impaled on it, in the end. The realization that your religion may be nothing more real than the stories of Zeus or Ra. I hit me the most when I started doubting the existence of an afterlife. That sudden sinking feeling that there would be no reward for living a good life in the end, for enduring the trials and tribulations and injustices we face every day. And oddly, there would be no punishment for my crimes, if I chose to commit them. I could do whatever I wanted, and only be accountable to natural and federal law.
It crushed me. Because if good and evil and morals are all just fabrications, then why follow any one over the other? Why follow them at all? We would just be living a lie, pretending to be something other than what we are: animals. Beasts.
But I guess I don't really think that. Because somewhere in my core is still the belief, drilled in by many years of church and catholic school, and later process and accepted by myself, in the hope of something better. That something is out there, that we can draw strength from, or comfort. And even if it isn't there, our belief, our faith, can make it so. You can will God into existence... or out of it.
All right, this is starting to sound like a Mage game discussion, so I'm ending it here.
