Sun, 29. April 2012
Faith in the Weird and Unprovable
When I was a child I was indoctrinated into my Mother's faith - the Church of England - which taught me that:
- questioning of faith was discouraged.
- doubters would be punished.
- faith is a virtue that would be my ticket to eternal life.
It's a familiar story but as I matured, I began to doubt the veracity of these things. When the evidence pointed towards certain conclusions, how could blind faith in the opposite be virtuous? Faith is not knowledge, at best it's guesswork and at worst it's pure bloody-mindedness.
Faith which has so many brand varieties is highly questionable. Why did I disbelieve the Hindu religion but accept Christian faith? Faith without the evidence is a rather shaky foundation on which to build an uncompromising lifetime of wasted human endeavour; faith which opposes the evidence is foolhardy; and faith which artificially concocts the evidence is dishonest and unworthy of trust.
In our everyday life, we learn to deal with facts and live within the certainties of the natural processes of cause and effect. If I want to turn the room lighting on, I have to walk over to the lighting switch and flip it down. I could pray all night for god to turn the light on for me - but I'd be sitting in the darkness until dawn. We learn the importance of evidence and knowledge when going about our daily business. Faith is no substitute for evidence in a court of law, nor was it in my professional life as an engineer. In everything I have done throughout my life, I have learned that faith is a very unreliable human thought process.
Religious faith, the cocksure allegiance to a particular chosen god - in the face of overwhelming lack of evidence - is the utilisation of a weak single-word argument (faith) as an umbrella for a whole series of even weaker arguments.
Religious faith has personal pre-requisites, such as:
- A predispositon towards gullibility and weakness of mind.
- Fear of losing cherished, long-held beliefs.
- A programming defect in the brain that compartmentalises religion and reality.
- A state of mental illness.
All religious people have their own set of unprovable weird faiths and they each reject the unprovable weird faiths of the others religions. Yet none of them will examine the reasons for rejecting the unprovable weird faiths of other religions and then apply the same reasoning to their own set of unprovable weird faiths.
Faith is usually an overpoweringly confident adherance towards unusual conjectures that were indoctrinated as a child and accepted into adulthood without question. Hence this article about a boy who needlessly died because his parents criminally decided that prayer was more important than seeking medical assistance. Any brain-washed person who believes that faith in prayer takes precedence over human intervention has a defective brain process.
I was brain-washed with christian beliefs as a child and my thought processes were defective as a consequence. However, I survived the experience by asking myself questions and I have now fully recovered and am able to lead a normal life. At least I know my Mum would have called a doctor in those circumstances.
Faith has it's own primeval prerequisites to:
- recklessly suspend one's power of reason,
- believe falsehoods, without question; and
- reject all truthful evidence which is detrimental to that belief.
- create "evidence" where none exists.
The Catholic faith directs a lot of time and effort towards hunting for "miracles" in order to turn popular deceased church characters into saints. Decades of search usually eventually come up with the prescribed minimum of two miracles attributed to the deceased human, as occurred with Ms Mckillopp. She died a century ago and the best they come up with are two very dodgy unproven "miracles", an average of one "miracle" every fifty years. That's not a very good success rate for a century of prayer and the Vatican will never release the evidence for their "proof" because they fabricated it.
I read about a women’s prayer group in the US that is praying for women who are bravely campaigning for the US military to become a non-discriminatory secular organisation to "befall fast moving incurable breast cancer". What difference is there between these callous-minded Christians and the medieval crudity of obsessive Islamism? Their prayers will not be heard by their superman but their message of hate will incite more of the same in a country where religious intolerance is increasing.