About faith.

 About faith.

Today I was watching a Netflix special about Jehovah's Witnesses, the religion my family was at the time I was born.

The documentary seemed to revolve, mainly, around this lady who was molested as a child. I found it odd that most of the documentary was about child molestation in this 'cult'. Granted, I am biased to the topic, my bias may actually be against the religion rather than in its favor; I grew up to despite religions as a whole. However the fact that so much of the documentary was about child molestation made the whole thing hard to watch. The fact that someone in any religion has abused children is not only obvious but also common sense, yet, I don't think that alone can be used to judge a religion as a whole. I was never molested nor I know anyone who was molested during the time I was part of that religion. Anyhow, beside the point. 

The documentary made me think about why I despite religions and, I came to realize that I dislike anything that has to do with 'faith'. See, the way I understand it, faith is another word for 'belief', or something one believes in. 'Faith' is stronger than 'believing' in something or at least that is how I think of it. 

In my opinion faith is the source of many problems that plague humanity; I'll tell you why I think that.

In my experience, in life, anyone who has ever asked me to believe them, were either caught doing something they shouldn't have done or were caught in a situation that would appear as they did something they shouldn't have done. Regardless of the actual circumstance, the person was basically asking me to pause my reasoning, set aside my judgment, and listen to their explanation. After listening I would be required to reason through these newfound details and, derive a conclusion of the situation and what it meant to me and how it related to that person. Then, I would go back to my normal life with the added detail of what just happened. For example, you catch you girlfriend cheating, you hear her explanation and make a decision based on that. If you decide to look over what happened and continue seeing your girlfriend, you move on with life. The key here is to understand that, once you made that decision, what happened doesn't disappear: it is there forever, even though  you have decide to look past it.

With faith thing are a little more complex. Faith asks you to pause your reasoning, your judgment as well as all the things you have learned to this point, and to listen to their explanation for something. In the case of faith, the explanation is always the same one: some sort of greater plan, structure, design etc that you are asked to believe despite the fact that has no foundation in either reality or the rules of what governs reality. After you have been asked to listen to this explanation, you are asked remain in this state to never go back to the normal reasoning you had been adopting up until that point. Once you are asked to believe into something you have jeopardized and corrupted yourself going against everything you learned until then. And, once you have bought into something that with your old judgment does not feel right to believe,  what are you going to use to make all the successive decisions you'll have to make in life?

To me, it is comparable to Sci-Fi movies. To appreciate Sci-Fi, you need to buy its premise whatever that may be. Once you have accepted that this story is about dragons magically flying over the earth breathing fire on real crops and houses, how are you not going to believe that there are also unicorns? How do you justify yourself in thinking dragons are fine, unicorns is a stretch?

 The danger Faith poses to humanity is easily underestimated. False beliefs are what fueled nearly all of the atrocities we have conducted on each others in the during the various periods in history. The belief that one's life is worth more than another or that one's ideals are more important then others. Then a gender is better than the other in the eyes of god. The fact itself that a god exists. That many gods exists but only one, yours, is the true god amongst them all. 

As a rule of thumb, I let my own judgement, uncloudied by any substance, lead me through life. And I will pause my own rigid reasoning to listen to when I am asked to believe but, after, I will step back in the shoes of the individual whose mind I painfully shaped and that I I've trusted since birth. I cannot dismiss all that I am because it did not form as an happenstance but required work.