Faith

C.A., in response to your comment on my first post:

I, too, was particularly fond of the part of my post that you mentioned. It was pretty much the point of the whole post, anyway. And it was the most fun to write. However, I need to amend a bit of what I said earlier because of this part of your comment: “I used to have faith.... The contradictions in the Bible were the first thing to start hammering away at my faith.”

See, faith is not just believing what you have been told or what you have been raised to believe. Everyone does that, at least to an extent, but not everyone has faith. That’s why I need to take this thought further. My original theory was that people whose first way of finding truth was their religion-faith would try their best to overcome perceived logical fallacies in that religion-faith. In revising that theory, I would say this: Faith is continuing even when your belief wavers. It’s “daring the soul to go beyond what the eyes can see.”

So, to revise what I said in my earlier post: Faith would require more than just trying to overcome perceived logical fallacies. After all, wouldn’t any sincere truth-seeker already be doing that? (It must have been what you were doing growing up.) I think real faith would require continuing to live according to one’s religion-faith, even when one is unable to overcome said logical fallacies.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that anyone from a religion with seemingly illogical beliefs must be a blind follower. I just know that faith absolutely has to be the first step to true conversion. Why? Because if, at first prayer, everything spiritual could immediately seem logical, every Christian mother's child would remain a Christian for life, right? (Actually, I am quite sure that even that would not be so, but I don’t have room to get into that now.)

I’d love to dig a lot deeper into this, but if I were to write everything I have thought while writing what I have thus far written, the result would be much too long a post. I guess what I want to communicate, is just this: Faithful people know what you have pointed out in your posts. At least, if they profess to believe the Bible, hopefully they have read it. And they know that there are many things that don’t make sense to them. That's where their faith comes in. So, while you and I do not believe many of the things that others do, we can still respect their faith – not their religion-faith – but the hope-faith they need in order to live life proactively according to an imperfect knowledge of their religion.

Although “evidence based thinking” is a wonderful tool, my knowledge of the religion I profess is not evidence-based. If it were, I could probably be persuaded out of it. Instead, the knowledge comes from deep within my heart, and the witnesses I have felt there have therefore been more powerful and convincing to me than any logic could have been. However, that does not mean that I have given up on logic either. Nor do I have a lack of evidence for my knowledge. I have encountered numerous miracles in my time and discovered myriads of hidden truths. But there are, as Einstein said, “two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is." It is for that reason – that I could live my life as if nothing were a miracle – that the foundation for my testimony cannot be logic or even miracles. As I said before, if it were, I could likely be persuaded to change my beliefs. If, however, I know the truth because I know it, in my heart as much as in my head, I cannot be persuaded.

Consider this. You trust your senses, right? Which do you trust more to tell you what is real – your eyes or your fingertips? If you see something, you assume it's real, right? Of course eyes can be fooled. But if you can touch something, if you can feel it, you know it's real. I suppose that is how I know what I know. My spiritual eyes can see miracles all around me if I look, but they can also be fooled. But even when that happens, I can rely on my spiritual feelings. Those are real. I have felt them, and I know.

My own point of the day:
Faith is things which are hoped for even when they are not manifest. So, a person of faith does not argue because he can't see.

And a doctrinal truth tidbit:
No one receives a witness until after his faith is tried. The rewards of faith are reaped only after a lot of diligence and patience.

C.A.W.