I agree with what was discussed in class that faith is believing in the absence of being able to see. I think that faith is hard for the visual person to believe because there is absolutely no way to see a god, or see god preform a godly act. Maybe this is one of the reasons I have such a hard time with religion, because I need to see things to believe that they are true. I need a full and complete explanation of something to understand, believe and comprehend it.
So how do some people give into faith so easily? I think that people are too afraid not to believe. I think that their fear of there not being a god, or even a life after a worldly life scares them into believing in a god that may or may not exist. We are taught to fear a life with no god.
I would agree that, for some people, religion is nothing more than a way to dispel fears about death and other difficult topics. However, making the jump from believing that this is true of some people to believing it is true of everyone does not, to me, seems reasonable. There are many reasons that people may choose to believe in a deity, from the aforementioned fear, to convention, to genuine, unselfishly motivated belief. It is easy to look at only Christianity and, from that religion's punishment-and-reward afterlife system, think that everyone following it - and, indeed, following any religion - is doing so only out of fear. However, there are many different divisions of Christianity, and many religions which are not Christianity. Some divisions of Christianity do not endorse the concept of hell. Some religions, such as Hinduism, have nonexistence (rather than eternal life) as their ultimate goal.
ReplyDeleteLastly, to a point, any worldview incorporates some sort of faith. Even believing only what you detect with your senses requires faith that your senses are not deceiving you; which, even independent of the notion of fallibility, can happen (hallucinations, mirages, etc.) If you do consider the idea of fallibility, you may find (like Descartes) that essentially everything is fallible. As such, in order to make any sort of conclusions about the world around you, you must have faith in something - even if that something is as seemingly basic as the existence of the world.
P.S. I also posted this on my blog if you'd rather read it there.