Faithless is a compliment

After writing the following rant, I had a long spontaneous conversation with a young couple at a family gathering. They have suffered several genuine tragedies over the last four years and they remain upbeat, committed to their family, and to each other. They attribute their perseverance to their Christian faith. I have great respect for them and the courage that they have shown in the midst of suffering. It leaves me with some real paradoxes in my thinking. I believe that it is important to speak our mind. I also believe that it is important to listen to those we disagree with the most. In most cases, truth is something that requires more than one set of eyes to be seen clearly. I think there are real dangers to organized religion, but some people use their faith to get through the day. I also think there are some real dangers to alcohol and marijuana…

The following piece is an irritable rant but I need to get it out so I can get back to my standard happy-go-lucky family travel narrative. But you know, fuck Trump and the foolishness that got him elected. So maybe skip this one if you’re into organized religion or Trump and I’ll be back soon with some recent family adventures.

I wish it was easier to convince people that faith is the most dangerous idea known to our species.  It is the root of most evils and the source of countless deaths.  Yet, faith is often described with pride.  People speak of having their faith tested as if their ability to resist new ideas was some kind of virtue.

Faith is a category of belief that requires no evidence.  It is, I guess, a spontaneously germinating idea that people just choose to believe.  I am hard pressed to find any meaningful difference between the word “faith” and the word “whimsy”.  In medical school, during a psychology course, I asked the professor what the difference between a delusion and a religion was, and he answered, “The number of people that believe it.”

But often people speak of faith as some kind of magic ability that allows them to make decisions without reason, evidence, consensus, or logic.  And, while it is certainly easy and comfortable to either accept the opinions of others or just avoid thinking altogether, it’s really a terrible way to go about making really important decisions, like when to start wars or how to decide who deserves human rights. (it’s everyone btw).

I’ve been studying European history form 1400-1800 with my son for the last several months and for the most part it consists of people killing each other over their religion and justifying it with faith.  We have been studying each religion that we encounter, Hindu, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Jainism, Christianity, Buddhism, Shinto, and even some Zoroastrianism.  Most of these have a doctrine that explicitly suggests a peaceful way of life and yet our history and our present is almost entirely about killing each other over ideas arrived at by the mystical process of faith.

And where does the faith come from?

“From inside.”

“You just know it.”

“It just feels right.”

All are answers people give me when I ask people about how they use faith to form an opinion.   We don’t let kids make decisions about driving, drugs, or sex based on “just feeling it was right”.  We educate them so they can actually think their way through things. 

The modern cell phone is so packed with faithless examples of applied science as to be almost miraculous itself. Yet, daily, people use their phones to spread uneducated opinions about the merits of scientific thinking. That’s like writing someone a letter to tell them the dangers of mailboxes. Other people feel comfortable with using faith to make decisions because so many other humans do it or because their parents did it. Basically, the same reasons that everyone used to smoke cigarettes.

We are sliding into another dark ages where charisma and violence are popularly considered leadership qualities and faith and consensus are considered valid ways to evaluate knowledge.  The last time we let faith run the government we had inquisitions and crusades. Take those impulses and mix in some weapons of mass destruction and the most sophisticated tools of propaganda and misinformation ever known and it gets ugly fast.

Faith is no way to go about making decisions like some kind of inner magic 8 ball.  If you came to the ER for a broken ankle and I told you “I just feel right about taking out your gallbladder,” you’d report me to the medical board.  But somehow we’ve let this go on long enough that people will vote for politicians because they “have faith”.  Bonkers. I want someone who has informational literacy, dispassionate analytical skills, and some emotional intelligence.

The truth is complicated, hard to understand, and time consuming to arrive at.  Stories are way easier to invent and way more fun to believe than the truth.  If someone makes the truth sound simple, it’s probably because they themselves are “simple”.  We seem completely bamboozled by the volume and self confidence of our political leaders.  Good leadership isn’t loudness, it’s listening.

Have we just gotten too lazy to think for ourselves?  We outsourced our memory to computers years ago, recently we have begun to outsource our creativity as well.   We need to spend time thinking, listening, and rethinking.  It’s how the world gets better.  It doesn’t get better because a loud guy stomps around and throws a hissy fit.  It doesn’t get better because your heart tells you that you are better than others somehow.  The world gets better when we realize that we are all more alike than different and that we have a very limited amount of time to solve some very pressing problems.  Violence is a great way to avoid listening, thinking, or taking time to realize that you might be wrong.  It’s also a great way to get a lot of kids killed.

Every time I let loose the leash on my tongue about the dangers of religious thinking, someone tries to kindly tell me about how there’s lots of good christians leading good lives and that I shouldn’t offend them.  Sorry, but we’ve let them off the hook for too long and look where we’ve ended up.  A nation with faith is not the answer to anything except why we will find ourselves embroiled in pointless wars.  Quit lying to children about Santa Claus and quit lying to them about Jesus.  Nobody is coming to save you except yourself.  The only heaven or hell that exists is the one we make of earth by deciding how we will treat other human beings and the planet that supports us.