RELIGIOUS FAITH – UNNECESSARY EVIL
People can have faith in anything. Perhaps the rabbit foot or God.
Religion says that faith is natural but God is only pleased by the faith he gives to you as a gift. If you accept this gift you are honouring God. God inspires you to believe and prompts you to see why. Catholic catechisms call this suupernatural faith.
So there is faith that is just faith and this religious psychic version.
Religion like atheists will see most faith as a problem. Atheists just go a step further and include the kind of faith they offer as an answer.
What about the view that belief in gods or God is not a problem but it is that
people are not letting the evidence show them what to believe? Those beliefs are
a problem in themselves if there simply is no decent evidence. And it might be
said we should not judge believers as ignoring evidence but as virtually telling
us they have none. Blind faith should be read as an indication that the
believers and unbelievers are united in one thing: God has no evidential
support.
A suspicion is a weak belief. To weakly believe Jesus was the perfect person is to admit you suspect anybody who opposes him or ignores him on purpose.
If belief in religion is a good thing and necessary then what if religious belief is a choice? Then you are to be morally blamed for not believing a specific religious system. That would lead to bigotry and forcing people to play along. What if religious belief is not a choice? Then the religion will seek to condition people. Either way, people are objectified. Choice or not it will be trouble either way. All evil and harm ultimately come down to a person being objectified at least a bit.
Human nature tends to develop faith which at root is thinking that luck will always be on your side. It's a magical belief though the person may not realise it. The realistic person knows that if you feel lucky you could be very wrong. The feeling of safety can be dangerous and it is clearly magical. That is why a person of faith can be so belligerent. You don't need to be in a religion for that to happen. But religion is a catalyst for it. If faith kills religion makes sure it does a better job.
Faith is belief in what might be wrong. You believe and hope it is true. While all admit that people of faith are irrational most people think that not all people of faith are. If we do not need faith, then anything else would be better and wiser. If we want to believe in the supernatural then we simply have to endorse faith. Faith is indispensible when it comes to the supernatural. The supernatural more than anything else is belief in what you cannot prove to be true. And it involves faith in man too. To have faith in a God of miracles means that it is the people who say he has done them that you have faith in.
If faith is good that does not mean that supernatural faith is good. If faith is good then supernatural faith is an abuse. It is an abuse if it claims to be supernaturally inspired in you but it is obviously no more inspired than somebody who has a supernatural faith that contradicts all your core teachings. It is an abuse simply because it has no reality check and goes too far. It is an abuse for there are better forms of faith you can have.
If faith in the supernatural is good it does not follow that all forms of it are good. If the believer shows resistance to reason and evidence and truth then it is bad. The supernatural always seeks to give its own version of evidence in the hope of overriding real evidence.
Doctors can battle to cure a sick person and get little or no credit from believers. They say God did the healing. Cured because of God you say? So it is not the doctors? It is not the person's own immune system? What you mean is they are cured by God because you have faith and have prayed. But it is not about you.
There are many kinds of faith. Faith is a necessary evil.
But it does not follow that all forms of faith are equally necessary. If you
have faith that things should be okay or reasonably okay that does not require
belief in the supernatural. That comes from scientifically looking at your life.
The equipment is not scientific machinery but your eyes and ears – your senses.
Religious faith, faith in the magical or supernatural, seems to be the cause of
religion. Many religions claim they emerged from people's faith. Luther formed a
religion based around faith in Christ alone.
Brutus in 2012 argued that faith does not cause religion. He thinks the
religious traditions come along and then faith appears in them. If he is right
then religion is a con. It gives spiritual teachings and doctrines and nobody
believes them but they pretend they do. It is only years down the line that
people get conditioned and bullied into believing in them for real. If he is
right, then it is an example of how when nonsense is repeated time and time
again as making sense and as the truth then people end up believing what they
should know is lies.
A religion is what binds you and the rest of your community to believe its
teaching. Christianity says that faith in the Christian religion and in the
doctrines and truths God has revealed is not natural and is a gift from God.
This recognises that the religion of God has to come from God and not man (if
God uses man to speak for him it follows that it is really God you are listening
to when you listen to his spokesman) for man errs and the religions he creates
could turn nasty or mislead people. A man-made religion is an oxymoron. It can
have no binding force. Would you really think you should say abracadabra every
day five times just because some man says so? Whatever does not bind or obligate
in reality is not a religion though it may be a semblance of one. Religion must
and can only be a communication to people from the God of truth. He must give
you an experience of your faith as a gift from him. It is a gift from God who is
a supernatural power that tells you the truth and only the truth and demands
obedience. Anything else is fake religion for it is deliberately man-made. If
religion is all man-made then it would be terrible if we thought we shouldn’t
challenge it or criticise it constructively. Anything human is dangerous if it
is made sacred or sacrosanct. In short, if man made it, fault it where it should
be faulted. If man made religion, then leave religion. Do not make a God out of
the opinions and speculations and lies of men. To do that is to sign up to
totalitarianism even if that never comes to pass. So to summarise, a religion
that is from God is based on God communicating truth to people and making sure
they know he is in touch with them. And false religion has to simulate this
experience. So religion and the notion of infallible revelation go together. If
the spiritual person sees herself as somehow infallible, so does the religious
person. If religion is bad because people think they know what they don't know,
then the spiritual not religious brigade are no better. Some would say the
latter are worse for each one of them wants no constraints but to be her or his
own religion. They would say there is nothing to stop them from going completely
astray. They reason that religion is bad but each person being her or his own
religion makes things worse for it means more religions - so the fewer religions
around the better.
Man-made religion is not a good thing. God-made religion would be a necessary
evil for faith itself despite the benefits could lead you astray. So faith needs
to be a gift or personal communication from God in order to be endorsed as a
necessary evil.
Faith involves a leap in the dark or the twilight. It is about accepting as true
what you cannot know to be true. It means treating it as true in your mind and
therefore your actions. If you see it as true it will affect your life and how
you relate to others and yourself.
Religion says that though the part where you don't know is an evil, the not
knowing is bad, overall, faith is good and it is worth it. The bad side of not
knowing is that you could be wildly mistaken and be wasting your energy and time
on faith. The good side is supposedly that you are taking a risk in the hope of
doing and believing the right thing. But that is an argument for good intention
not faith. It is simply not true that faith is a good thing. It might be
necessary at times but it is not good or to be celebrated. If faith is a
necessary evil, you can only stop making it worse by searching for truth and
being open to it and to evidence.
Faith that cares little about searching for truth and evidence and integrity is
by default NOT a necessary evil - it is just evil, period! Is it any wonder that
faith like that has led religious people to reason that the end justifies the
means, that it is okay to do wrong if you want to bring good out of it? It has
led to it because it is an example of the end justifying the means!
When we do great harm or little harm in order to get something, we are using the
evil to bring about some good. We are all the same. We never do evil for its own
sake but for the sake of good. Thus faith is dangerous in our hands.
The best of a bad lot is faith that is genuinely about making you the best
person for others and yourself.
A faith that involves a punishing God is simply vindictive. On earth, we need
criminal law to protect us from dangerous people which is where punishment comes
in. It is vindictive to be happy about it. Criminal law is a necessary evil. For
believers in God, it is not enough. They want to believe that God has a criminal
law of his own set up too which makes up for the faults and errors of criminal
law. But it is vindictive to wish there was another law. It is better to just
put up with the one we have got and be happy to improve it where necessary.
In the absence of evidence that such a law as the law of God exists, it is
clearly vindictive to believe in it and to hope it exists.
If faith is bad or a necessary evil, then it follows that the bigger the leap it
is the worse it is.
Religion would be alarmed if you thought that jumping off a cliff would bring a super-powered robot to life so it would do good for the world and save lives. But to argue that faith is a gift from God means that you could doing that because you think this faith is from him.
Supernatural faith solves nothing and makes the danger of faith far worse. It is just a trick to get out of admitting that unevidenced faith is harmful and it gets worse unless it is checked.
