Too Much Faith
February 1, 2019
Scholar Sharpening his Quill
WE LIVE in an era of faith. Too much faith. Far too many people live on faith exclusively.
Faith is the acceptance of a belief on the authority of someone else. For instance, I have never been to Athens, Greece, but I take it on the authority of many others that it exists.
Faith should never work against reason. The problem arises when faith overcomes all reason.
Here’s one example. Many learn the idea from others that God doesn’t exist, even though the existence of God can without much difficulty be proven with the use of reason. But instead of reasoning it out, they take it entirely on faith that God doesn’t exist. And off they go.
College professors tell students that humans — who think and speak — evolved from organisms that cannot think or speak. And, on faith alone, without troubling to reason it out, people swallow this patently ridiculous idea that has never been verified scientifically. It has spread in the same way a false rumor spreads. It excites people and they believe it. Most people in history would have shaken their heads in wonder if they could have foreseen that a belief like this would someday have universal acclaim. It would have instantly disproven to them that intellectual progress is inevitable.
People are told that the differences between the sexes are unnatural and can be almost totally eliminated. On the authority of others, despite all the evidence of their senses and simple reason, they believe it! Why do they believe such an absurdity? It has certain advantages, it’s true. But generally it is easier to accept everything on blind faith. And many have placed their faith in the powerful and the foolish.
Here’s another whopper: we are told it is “hateful” to protect one’s own country from foreign invasion. And many believe it! The most hideous or uninteresting of “artworks” are displayed in museums and are called fine art. Many believe because they are told to believe. Or there’s the biggest whopper of all: six million people were gassed to death. Six million. Not to mention that skyscrapers can collapse in clouds of dust not long after catching fire — when nothing even remotely similar has ever been seen.
Accepting things on faith is not necessarily bad. We can’t think everything out in life. But it is bad when those with normal mental equipment are asked to violate common sense on the most essential questions — and they do it happily.
One more absurdity people take on faith: “We can’t go back.” We are told that we must accept a world of big stores, big buildings, big roads, big noise, big wars, big companies, big government, big taxes, and we can never, ever go back to the humane, scaled-down smallness we all secretly want. We are told we can’t go back and so we believe it obediently. The Age of Reason was misnamed. We live in its twilight: The Age of Blind Faith.
