I was going to write an entry about politics, something that's been on my mind a lot lately. It, like millions of other thoughts I had, ended up as one of the multitude of half-written drafts saved in this blog that will forever remain unfinished. I wanted to keep going with the politics post, but today I started thinking about something else: faith. Faith in people, faith in ourselves, faith in our principles, having the faith to believe in your environment and the people around you. Faith to keep going on when you're not sure what the hell you're doing or why you're doing it or whether you're even right; in those moments blind faith is the only thing that can sustain you. I think it's an incredible testament to the human will that we're able to put our faith in a person, a belief, an organization, without fully knowing why or what we're getting into and just trusting in something we can't even see or know really exists. That ability to just simply trust and hope for the best and believe you know it will work out for the best, even when you don't know a thing.
Since January, nearly every day has been one of those moments where I have questioned everything and everyone around me, where I felt tested at every second of every day. Where I felt like my very morals and values came into question some days. Where I felt like I couldn't stand it some days. Where I felt like I was in a moral struggle and didn't even know that I wanted anymore what I had thought I wanted all along. But then there was that faith: something, someone, that gave me a source of blind faith to keep pushing myself farther when I felt like everything, everything, was going in the wrong direction.
So what do you do when you start losing faith, completely?
Since January, nearly every day has been one of those moments where I have questioned everything and everyone around me, where I felt tested at every second of every day. Where I felt like my very morals and values came into question some days. Where I felt like I couldn't stand it some days. Where I felt like I was in a moral struggle and didn't even know that I wanted anymore what I had thought I wanted all along. But then there was that faith: something, someone, that gave me a source of blind faith to keep pushing myself farther when I felt like everything, everything, was going in the wrong direction.
So what do you do when you start losing faith, completely?
Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying, "Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding." There's a reason we refer to "leaps of faith" - because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational. It isn't. If faith were rational, it wouldn't be, by definition, faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity, it would just be...a prudent insurance policy.
-From "Eat Pray Love"
I love you!
Is this a follow-up on that post on reality? So that in the absence of certainty, and a referrable basis for decision-making, you fall back on the values of an organisation, a religion, people around you, to provide certainty so that it isn't only your subjective interpretations of reality that you're relying on? What's wrong with uncertainty? A forum in which people walk around blindly pushing ideas they can't justify with reference to anything but their own values or ideas or beliefs, and where everyone is objectively right but only for so long as they are speaking. As faith is pre-acceptance, it's also the absence of question (to be corny).