Nonbelievers: They Walk Among Us! (Or, To Believe or Not to Believe)

"What thoughts do you have for those of us who find faith a difficult endeavor, who weren't raised with it and don't understand it? Are there certain types of people who are naturally predisposed to enjoy faith, and those who are not?"

An excellent pair of questions (submitted in response to a previous post) that underscore a very important point. The most obvious type of conundrum between people of different faith backgrounds is where these diverge on matters of religious belief. However, it puts a new twist on the tension inherent to interfaith relationships when one member of an interfaith couple doesn't have any religious beliefs, doesn't believe in God at all.

The question is, first, what thoughts do I have for those who have difficulty with even arriving at faith itself, understanding the need for it, the benefit of it? I think that is a hard question to answer. For someone who was not raised with any religious beliefs or spiritual practices in childhood, to seek these as an adult becomes a purely elective choice. This in turn begs the question: Why would anyone elect this option in the first place? Are some more predisposed to faith than others? I do not think that this is the case, although there are certainly holy, spiritual people throughout history whose life's work is a testament to a deep and abiding faith far greater than the average person's (e.g., Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Oscar Romero). On average, though, I think that we all have the same capacity for faith and for skepticism or outright disbelief. Given that, again, what is it that draws some to believe?

There can be any number of ways that a non-believing adult arrives at the decision to pursue faith in God and the spiritual practices that support this endeavor. However, I would wager that most of them are superficial, incentives that spur the individual in the form of external events and pressures. For example, conforming one's behavior and adopting a religious faith to please a spouse, fiancé/fiancée or girlfriend/boyfriend. Nonbelieving people may sometimes turn to God when they are suddenly caught in extremis: faced with the diagnosis of a fatal, untreatable illness, imminent financial ruin, the dissolution of a years'-long relationship one's dearest and closest companion.

For my money, the most ideal starting place for one's faith journey is within the self. Whatever the source of the stirring that comes from within, it represents the self's own desire to seek out and to know God, or to at least explore the question of God's existence. Those things that the heart wants most, we will pursue with the most energy. We don't have to be told to want the things we want, and seeking to try to know and understand God is one of those things. You either want it or you don't.

Of course, our various faith traditions give us their versions of why it is important to acknowledge and worship God. It's just that, sometimes a religion's dogma gets in the way of our own dharma, in effect becoming a barrier unto itself and also to one's journey to exploring who and what God is. Sometimes religion gives us stuff that is just too hard to swallow or otherwise reconcile with a belief in an all-powerful and benevolent God. I personally think that this is where the skeptics get it right. No matter what faith traditions we come from, there is nothing about faith in God that says we're not allowed to question the teachings of any given religion. At one point Jesus said to the religious authorities of his day, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." In our present day this could also be read to mean that religion was established to serve the needs of people, people are not here to serve the needs of any given religion. The full truth of who or what God is far too vast for any one faith to contain in its teaching or practices. We are "interfaith" because obviously none of our respective traditions has won the "clearly we're right about God" contest. Both our beliefs and our non-beliefs are challenges to each other. But doesn't that make the journey more interesting?

I think that the moral of the story for interfaith homes is the importance of open and honest inquiry. Providing space for your spouse, fiancé/fiancée, girlfriend or boyfriend to talk about his or her faith or his or her lack of faith is an important means of growing closer. The more we understand each other, the more we understand our own selves. The more questions we are asked about our beliefs, the more we are required to take responsibility for and defend these. The more we model openness and respect for each others' beliefs, the more natural we become in making room for these in our homes, and the better role models we will be for any children that may join our families over time.

Sustaining faith in God is a matter of patience, prayer, contemplation, and active engagement in the human community. Establishing faith in God, recognizing and pursuing the desire to do so, is a matter of deep soul-searching, of questioning. Each person initiates his or her own journey of inquiry into the meaning of life. This doesn't mean we all end up in the same place belief-wise. Making room in our homes for each other’s respective search, as well as the space to discuss what we think we've found, helps to ensure that no matter where we end up on our respective journeys, we still travel together. Shalom.

-Doug L.

FOR FURTHER REFERENCE (Links Updated 05/27/07)

Essay on Faith (This I Believe, NPR)

Infidels.org (Atheism Web)

Beliefnet.com (Faiths and Practices)

Kurt Vonnegut: Free-Thinking American (NPR, All Things Considered, April 12, 2007)

15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will (The Onion A.V. Club, April 27, 2007)

Keeping the Faith

"For faith to really be of any value, it must be based on facts, on reality."

Huh? That's a new one on me. I don't need my English degree to know that faith means the exact opposite of this. In fact, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, faith means, "firm belief in something for which there is no proof", among other things. Why this attempt to confuse faith in the improvable with belief in the demonstrable?

It's easy to just choose to believe something completely if you are so predisposed. If you are looking for a faith-based value system or political ideology (or some combination of both!) that will reflect your own view of the world back to you it shouldn't be hard to find. And believing in something for which there is demonstrable proof doesn’t take faith, it just requires the basic capacity to recognize and acknowledge reality. Faith in the existence of God, on the other hand, is tough stuff. Jesus, for example, thought it would be nothing short of a miracle if his own disciples had a share of faith roughly equivalent to the size of a mustard seed: "Amen, I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will be able to move mountains. Nothing will be impossible for you."

Now, if the men and women who spent at least an entire year of their lives living and working alongside Jesus could only muster (mustard?) this much faith, well... Just don't tell me that faith is an open-and-shut case of recognition and acceptance of the facts. Once you choose to exchange faith for fact, growth and the maturity of wisdom through experience for cold comfort and assurance you can reduce your mind’s ability, even its inclination, to see greater truths, to question and challenge harmful messages that are packaged in faith-based language. Some current examples include the entire movement devoted to the notion that God hates gay people, or those who believe that when Jesus returns to earth after the Rapture, he's coming with a pair of fully loaded sawed-off shotguns.

To what end do we apply our beliefs? In what do we have faith? What earthly purpose does our faith serve? The answers to these questions can reveal if our minds are vibrant gardens of thought and consideration, or stale receptacles of outdated and disproved notions and prejudices. I pose the issue in these terms as a response to those who call themselves people of faith, yet who for years have defined the word "faith" in the narrowest of terms. "Faith" as blind obedience to a particular church's teachings and pronouncements. "Faith" as full and unquestioning support for a particular political candidate or party. "Faith" as actively supporting or engaging in acts of hate and violence because it has been said that this is what God wants. The notion of faith as an evolving process of contemplation and the application of original thought has been overwhelmed by those who would nefariously gird certain political and cultural agendas with the authority of religious conviction. I've recently read a beautiful and succinct rebuttal to these notions in a book review on Amazon.com. The book's author is the former wife of a fundamentalist pastor. In reflecting back on what was obviously a traumatic period in her life she writes that she has come to see spirituality (an expression of faith) as "a road of discovery—not of submission to a rulebook."

The pursuit of faith in God calls on each person who seeks this to strive to develop a deep understanding of who or what God is, and what it is God calls upon us to do as members of the human community. While the question of who or what God is may not be knowable, there seems to be a historic consensus as to what it God calls upon us to do. To close today's post, here are some insights illuminating this basic call, and which provide a good starting point for anyone's faith journey. Shalom.

"...a state that is not pleasing or delightful to me, how could I inflict that upon another?" — Buddhism

"What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary. Go and study it." — Hillel

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is the law and the prophets." — Jesus

"None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself." — Muhammad

"This is the sum of duty; do naught unto others what you would not have them do unto you." — Mahabharata

"What you do not wish upon yourself, extend not to others." — Confucius

"Regard your neighbor’s gain as your gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss." — Taoism

"All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really One." — Native American Spiritual Teaching

"In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self." — Jainism

"That nature alone is good which refrains from doing another whatsoever is not good for itself." — Zoroastrianism

-Doug L.

FOR FURTHER REFERENCE

Interfaith Voices Podcast, 'The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt and Repairing the World' (April 26, 2007)

Utterly Humbled by Mystery ('This I Believe', NPR, December 18, 2006)

'Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables' (NY Times, July 25, 2006)