With an agonizing writhe of my shoulders, I peck at the keyboard in an effort to expose a tremendous spiritual flaw. Well, it has always seemed to me that it is a flaw, and it has led to a great deal of silence when speaking with those who are staunchly religious.
How do I say this… Ok, here goes: I have no faith.
Sheesh. I said it. Out loud, even. If your eyes roll up in dismay and then off to one side with disbelief, or even drop with an embarrassing realization you are not talking with someone with even an ounce of spirituality, I will feel a heaviness in my heart that I have felt many times over.
You see, I don’t believe in faith. Oh, I know, it is considered the bedrock of so much religion. You hear of the ‘unfaithful’ or the ‘faithless’ and the nose starts to twist up as if encountering a bad odor. I feel that way myself. To realize that these words apply to me initiates a sort of cultural imperative to hang my head. But I’m stubborn, and I refuse to lower my gaze for very long.
I am a bit like someone who might have been from Missouri, at least I gather that from the license plates which refer to the ‘Show Me State.’ This is how I look for spirituality. I need to see it.
The trouble with faith is that it relies on holding a matter as truth without any evidence. This just rubs me wrong. I go through a lot of rumination about choosing one thing over another in this world, and when it comes to my spirituality, I can hardly imagine not being at least as careful here. Heck, I look at the ingredients on the boxes in the supermarket, you’d think it would be no less important to do the same when it came to spirituality.
Truth without evidence is belief. Now, if there is any more twisted and sordid confession, it is that I am a man without belief. Or, at least, I think I am. I have no doubt but that lots of people could eyeball my understanding and working knowledge of the world and point out all matters of belief that I have come to believe is knowledge.
The point is, however, that I don’t want to. I want my world view to rest on what is true. Given that I am weak and fallible, there are likely to be punctures in my metaphysics, and such things under analysis simply won’t hold water. Hence I am a faithless unbeliever.
I don’t care how righteous I feel about it, it still sounds bad.
Thanks Steve for this post. I know what you mean when you say that it still sounds bad and that the tendency is the feeling that one needs to hang their head with such a confession. For me, it's not so much a matter of faith or no faith, but a matter of whether I can use spiritual language in any form. Since my leaving of the church and my faith any words that carry any hint of something "out there" just don't work for me anymore. In the same sense that you talk about not believing anything you've not experienced, which I totally agree with, for me it's more not believing anything that is not physical in nature.
ReplyDeleteAs a result, rather than trying to develop a new spiritual language, what I think is happening with me is that I am expanding my view of what the physical includes. Take the resonating that comes with me living here in these Santa Cruz Mountains as an example. I can feel my descendants here. One of them was a Frenchman who jumped off a Russian ship and came ashore near Davenport and found his way to this valley. He and several others opened a saw mill right here in this valley. After growing up in Santa Cruz and then leaving at the age of 18, I have now returned 44 years later to live in these mountains. I can feel the presence of my ancestors who lived and worked here. But to me that has nothing to do at all with anything outside myself. For me, the sense of their presence has to come from my physical, gene, cell connection with them. It comes through the physical and not through faith, belief, spirit, god, or anything of the sort. I am connected to these mountains and them through my DNA. That, it seems to me, is where science needs to look to discover that which others call spirit, vortexes, intuition, god, and such.
I have not expressed this very well. I am still trying to find the language for what I feel to be true. And yes, somehow it still comes out sounding so cut and dried, so cause and effect, so analytical, that it sounds bad. But for me it is not dry, it is fully alive with all the energy and passion and joy that we call life. Thanks for giving us your thoughts and words, so that we too can reflect on them and come clearer about our own thoughts and words.
Frank.