Why Doubt Religious Faith?
I doubt the whole religious faith thing, where faith is believing strongly in an ideal or assertion or an entity without prior proof of its existence. Many a violent crime in the name of religion has been committed throughout human history because people believed in an ideal and then acted according to such beliefs (E.g. the radicals who knocked down the World Trade Center buildings, the Jews who killed Christ, the crusades, and so on). A belief that is not subjected to critical thought and externally measurable evidence to support it is dangerous. I don’t think I’d want “faithers” on my jury deciding my fate; especially if the evidence favored my innocence. They might say, never mind what our eyes, ears and other senses tell us. We have faith in the prosecutor, who knows what he’s doing. So Tom must be guilty. Nope. No faith in religion for me. It’s difficult enough to believe in things that are immediately verifiable. So it’s nearly impossible for me to believe in anything that cannot be examined firsthand.
Besides, for an objective observer watching all these different faithers, how would he get a real sense which faith is the right faith without any externally measurable and debatable facts to either refute or back it up? Without additional validation through one’s own senses, one person’s faith is just as valid or invalid as anyone else’s. Thus, the choice of which religious faith to follow becomes strictly arbitrary. That’s the big problem with believing in things just because you want to believe in them. Without more substantial reasoning, anyone can believe in anything if they want; and strongly believe in it too. Thus, the religious wars. I blame the teaching of religious faith as a valid reason for adopting a belief for triggering many of those wars.
Here’s how the mechanism of conflict derived from faith works: One set of people form faithful beliefs that they cannot prove but through faith, accept. Then, another group does the same, with beliefs that contradict what the first group believes in. Then, the two persecute each other and eventually, fight it out. It’s the same story over and over, and this sad tale will continue repeating itself until people get past the implied arrogance of this faith thing. They need to begin demanding objective data upon which to base their beliefs, and stop relying on conjecture, whimsy, or fantasy. We could head off many world conflicts if people would stop believing so much what they’re told to believe.
I’ve read numerous religious books about religious faith through the years, and have spent hundreds of hours with my six or seven different bibles. So do you really think that reading yet another book that makes the case for faith would further validate the case for it in my mind? I doubt it. I’ve perused numerous incantations of this faith idea before. Every one of them is built on the notion, without objective proof mind you, that God exists exactly as is laid out in the Bible. But a book cannot make a good case for what it is arguing, when its arguments are built on the premise that the thing that it’s trying to prove has already been proven. It seems then that reading such material would probably be a waste of time. In fact, God is not provable in a rational sense, which is why there’s this strong insistence on faith throughout religion in the first place. You have to have religious faith and accept a whole bunch of wild stuff as fact, in order to genuinely participate in and highly enjoy religious services. But I do not subscribe to the whole concept of faith. So it’s unlikely that I’ll ever believe in God the way the strong faithers do.
Follow God through religious faith? You don’t need religious faith in a god to justify adherence to good (godly) moral principles. I mean, the Bible teaches many ethics that I hold dear myself. Many folks besides, uphold these in their lives, though they might not necessarily believe in God. On the other hand, there are those who trumpet their faith in religiou with such loudness and high frequency that it hurts the ears if you listen long enough. Yet, these vocal faithers do not uphold said moral values. Who among either these genuinely good and boastful good will be left behind and who will go? That answer is not so clear-cut. That is to say that there are those who question God’s existence, yet are still good, and there are those who claim that they’re quite certain, yet are quite bad. So as I see it, there will be those who remain here after the rapture that you would not expect, and those who will go to heaven that again, you would not expect; assuming that God and heaven exist in the first place.
No, I’m not bound and determined to reject the ideas in the Bible per se. In fact, I admit that they could be true. There are indeed many things in this universe that even to this day, remain beyond human sight, much less their comprehension. I merely point out that this whole faith basis for knowing that the stories of God and Christ in the Bible are in fact true, is rickety at best, and fantasy at worst. No, I’ll probably never agree with the faithers that the Bible was inspired by God, nor that it represents the absolute truth. Still though, I’ve learned many good things from the Bible. It is one of several potent guides for generations of humanity to follow, so that they might survive together and happily at that.