Faithless

I had to take a break from the Good Book. Far too much genocide and child torture for me to indulge in on a daily basis. Not if I intend to remain somewhat civil.

 I wanted instead to address a problem I've been struggling with expressing for quite a while now. The problem of faith. I had a conversation in which a friend told me  they felt sad for me because I didn't have faith.

Their argument was that while thoughts can be wrong and feelings can be wrong, faith can't be wrong.

My stance is that all three can be wrong. That's why I try to surround myself with people that help keep me honest and challenge my beliefs. Not religious beliefs in my case, obviously, but beliefs about politics and video games  and music and sex.

See, as a freethinker or secular humanist or skeptic or whatever, I don't, or can't, just accept the dictates of authority unthinkingly. I don't know that other people can, or if they do that they'd be aware of it, but they certainly seem to. 

Now I'm not going to sit here and pretend as if I NEVER accept a statement without carefully evaluating it. Not that I have the best bullshit detector, but just because I'm kinda lazy and most of the shit I hear on a day to day basis doesn't matter in the big picture.

For the things that do matter, or that I consider as mattering, there are certain sources I'm more inclined to believe than others. If The Blaze makes a potentially slanderous claim against a Democratic Congressman then I'm more inclined to approach it skeptically than I would be if Alternet made a similar claim against a Republican Congressman. Nobody is immune to some level of cognitive bias.

Which is the awesome thing about the scientific method, incidentally: It filters out bias as much as possible.

Going along with that, there have been some things that I REAAAAAAAAALLY wanted to believe that just weren't true. And conceding that they weren't is not always fun. Metallica was not that groundbreaking and original. Obama is another war President. M. Night Shyamalan only made one good movie. Two Worlds 2 is a shit game. There is a personal, loving, sentient entity out there that wants the best for me, and I can't understand it because it's too big for me to understand. That girl from the coffee shop wasn't really into me. Adam Sandler was never that funny. Ouch.

Faith now, where does faith figure into things? I can argue from a scientific perspective, a philosophical perspective, I can cite research, I can do whatever to assert my stance or reject a claim, but what seems to be the fundamental difference between the friend that feels sad for me, and me, who feels sad for my friend, is faith. 

Here are some of the arguments I've heard.

"Faith is the opposite of fear." 

I make no secret about my past as a seemingly hopeless drug addict. And one thing that I have in common with most addicts is a predisposition for fear-based decision making. Jumping to the worst possible conclusion, instead of the most likely. Constantly making back up plans for when things inevitably don't work out. Choosing the security of monotony over the risk of adventure. Things like that.

Faith isn't the opposite of fear, though. Hope is the opposite of fear, and reason is the opposite of faith. That's my stance. 

Faith can get someone through fear, of course. But so can courage, and reason, and emotional support. But faith is not the opposite. Hope is. Well, inasmuch as emotions have opposites, which they don't really, but for the purpose of the argument...

They even, when unfounded, have diametric outcomes. Fear, if what is feared doesn't come to pass, leads to relief: A positive emotion. Hope, if it doesn't pan out, leads to disappointment: a negative emotion.

Faith is a tool used to deal with fear. But as I've stated above, there are other tools that can be used to deal with it.

"Everyone has faith, even you." 

I'd agree that almost everyone has the capacity for faith, even a tendency towards it. Most people are uncomfortable with uncertainty, and faith fills that need for answers nicely. But just because most people HAVE it, doesn't mean it's necessarily a good thing.

We also all have a skeleton not particularly suited for a bipedal lifestyle, but no one's claiming lower back problems are a good thing. Something similar can be said about self-pity, overconfidence, scientific ignorance, the appendix, and so on.

Faith isn't necessary, in other words. And while I'm not claiming I'm completely devoid of faith, I am claiming that I would like to be. Which is the point where the argument usually devolves into some kind of "You have faith in science/electricity/yourself" thing. Which doesn't work as it relies on conflated terminology and false equivalency.

I don't have faith in electricity, I have expectations based on past experience corroborated with a mountain of evidence. If I pay the bill, and there are no wiring problems or blown fuses or shorts or burnt out bulbs, then when I flip the switch on my lamp, my lamp will turn on. That doesn't require faith. Even if I didn't understand HOW electrons flow and interact with tungsten; and even though I don't understand WHY electrons flow (which assumes there has to be a reason, which there isn't, but that's usually part of the argument,) the lamp will still work. 

On the other hand, faith in God has NEVER worked as reliably as electricity. In any test or study that I'm aware of, the efficacy of faith has always been statistically within the margin of error for no discernible effect, other than as an emotional security blanket.  And there are more practical and functional options than that.

"Faith keeps us humble." 

Humility is a tricky concept to define. The definition I use is "a sense of one's relative importance in a given situation."

The reasoning behind this argument, inasmuch as I understand it, is that so long as God is at the top of the ladder, the believer will be at the bottom, effectively inoculating the believer from grandiosity, self-righteousness, selfishness, and so on.

Which fails miserably as a hypothesis. Assuming there were a personal, all powerful God, why would placing God at the top of one's priorities ensure that anything below God wouldn't be just as fucked up as having one's self at the top? And why are we looking at life as a chain instead of a sphere or tree?

Yes, I'm really high on my list of things I care about. But that doesn't automatically mean I'm a self-centered egomaniac. While I certainly used to be (and still can be on occasion,) I have a completely different relationship with myself than I did four years ago.

Today I realize that I have to be important to myself because if I'm not I won't be any good to others.   Now, having said that, I realize that everyone else is just as important to themselves as I am to me. And assuming there's NOT a personal, loving God making sure everyone is interacting properly in accordance with some impossibly complex plan, as I do, I have to keep this in mind. I can miss a meal if someone hasn't eaten in two days. I can make myself available to someone I know is going through a rough patch, even if it means missing out on something I really wanted to do. Why? Because I know what those things are like.

That's just empathy and compassion, our evolved herd instincts, and, as far as I'm concerned, the most beautiful and powerful thing about humanity. 

"Without faith I wouldn't be where I am today."  

Without faith you might be somewhere much nicer. 

The problem with this kind of argument is that we don't have extra lives. We can't go back a year, make different choices with different motivations and check.

I suspect that if I hadn't been waiting on some kind of sign that I might have taken the initiative to move out of Texas long before I did. And it may have worked out poorly. Or spectacularly. There is no way of checking.

To claim that by merely having faith led to the current favorable outcome is puerile. It's superstition at it's worst. I know lots of people that are rancid with faith that never catch lucky breaks.

Every day trillions of choices are made. Not to say it's luck, but the web of human interaction, factored in with all of the non-human variables, is so complex that it might as well be. Saying that faith is the most important factor at play is like saying your lucky shirt did it. 

My life, whether judged from quality of lifestyle, to overall happiness, to general satisfaction, has improved a ton since I abandoned faith. That alone is enough to disqualify faith as the most important factor. And in my case I suspect that it was one of the primary factors in keeping me stuck in a life I was unhappy with while desperately trying to convince myself that it was the best possible life I could have.

"I know by faith."

Is usually the justification given for the really big questions. Or a variation on it.

Why do you believe in God despite the lack of evidence? Why do you think there's an afterlife? How can you claim your moral compass is powered by the same God that Fred Phelps has?

The undercurrent with this argument is always that there's something wrong with my worldview because I choose to know things that are real. The Big Bang theory doesn't give a shit about me. Evolution doesn't want to give me a big hug if I can't pay my electric bill. Christopher Hitchens won't comfort me in my hour of need. So I'm the one missing out, right? 

No. I'm not. While the certainty of faith can be appealing at times, I know where it leads. It leads to a rigid, inflexible worldview with no more mystery in it beyond burrowing deeper into the delusion. Faith is so small. I'm an ape that's just clever enough to know that I'm an ape made of particles too small to see, living on a wet rock orbiting an unremarkable star in an unremarkable galaxy. I have so much left to learn and see and do. What compares to that? Your claim that the creator of the universe is your personal buddy? Fine. Next time you talk to him ask him why he waited 14 and a half billion years to make you think we're so damn important.

I'd prefer a truth I can verify, or that at least can be verified. And I can live with honestly not having the big answers much more soundly than by dishonestly claiming I do. And the best thing about that? I can withhold judgement on things I'm unsure about. I don't have any commandments to follow. I don't have to have answers. And that concept gets conflated with faith quite a bit.

If I hear something and can't decide whether or not to believe it, and can't do the work to verify it, I can just say "I don't know yet." What caused the Big Bang? I don't know. Maybe nothing. May be the wrong question. Why is everything the way it is? I don't know. What's the purpose of life? I don't know. May be there isn't one.

I love that concept. When I first got clean I didn't think I could stay clean, because I had never been able to before. And that was what helped. and I wish someone would have explained it to me then. I didn't think anything would work for me, but I was told to 'believe that I believe,' and 'to be willing to be willing' and inane garbage like that. So I withheld judgement long enough to try some new things, and found some things that worked, like emotional honesty, self-appraisal, willingness, allowing my beliefs about myself to be challenged, forgiveness, making amends for my past transgressions. And I tried some things that didn't work, like prayer, faith, belief in the supernatural, and reading alleged holy books.

So no, I don't have faith. Not in any kind of God that's relieved my obsession to use drugs or is helping me get through the rough parts of life. If I could say that I had faith in anything then it would be in humanity in general. I think humans will eventually get their act together. I have no real evidence for this, as class struggles and poverty and war and cruelty don't seem to be going anywhere, so by that definition it would be faith. For anything else: I can withold judgement, I can have reasonable   expectations, or I can just say, in all honesty, "I don't know," and be done with it. 

Of course, saying "I don't know" starts a whole new argument.

"How can you claim you're an atheist when you don't KNOW there isn't a God?" "How can you say you don't believe in an afterlife if you don't KNOW that there isn't life after death that just can't be measured by modern science?" And the answer is: honestly.

Believe me, I would really like it if there was a God out there, or that I'd get to see my father again. But looking at it realistically, probably not. I don't believe in God because I have no reason to. When I did it didn't make me any happier or more successful than I would have been anyway, not that we can check, and I haven't encountered or experienced anything, ever, that needed God as an explanation. Maybe part of us survives after death. I doubt it, but maybe. But it won't be the heaven or hell that religion claims. We know consciousness is a product of the brain, so that won't survive. And the ideas of eternal pleasure or pain are out as our nerve endings die with our body. So whatever survives won't be US as individual, unique entities. Some kind of chi or force or life essence that can't be measured or tested? Sure, that's possible, but if it exists there's no reason to believe in it as believing in it serves no practical use or purpose. It might make for great science fiction and karate movies, but I have never fucking yet seen someone shoot Force Lightning or harness mystical Chinese secret energies to do anything more than swindle gullible hippies out of money.