Faith: Oh, What the Heck . . .

I started out by replying to Liara, Misti, Pauline, and Vishesh on the previous post’s comments thread but it got so long – it’s a post. So here it is:

Thanks . . .

Thanks for your perceptive comments and questions. In a way my whole book is about faith and one chapter is entirely given over to this topic.

However, after doing those recent posts on love, my feeling is that if it's possible to transcribe book chapters into blog posts, I don't know how. So I think my upcoming posts will be additional short faith "sayings" - hopefully a more blogger-friendly approach than trying to excerpt/adapt sections of the book.

Meanwhile . . . here are a few things to think about concerning faith from my reply-turned-blog post:

What exactly is an experience of faith? When have you felt it most powerfully?

This might help answer Pauline's question about what it is that we have faith in.

Vishesh: I think you're probably right about that - that faith in some sense animates us, that perhaps even people who consider themselves faithless aren't so much faithless as unaware of their faith.

But as to faith in myself or any other person or even the entire species - I know for sure that's not where my faith resides. On a personal level, my body is faltering and failing in ways I never could have imagined. At the same time, one of the people I’ve been closest to is simultaneously declining in a different way – probably Alzheimer's.

When I look at us as a species, I don't feel hopeless but neither do I feel convinced we're going make a long-term go of it. We're clearly "dysfunctional" and I wouldn't want to try to predict what kind of shape we'll be in a century or two or three from now . . .

Of course, by "faith in ourselves" you may have just meant "self confidence" - but that would be a different thing to my mind than faith. Self confidence, even when it's very great, is limited in ways that faith isn't - for example, by the recognition of our own mortality and fallibility.