Alan Watts drew an interesting distinction between belief and faith. Referring to the root of belief in Middle English (lief, meaning "wish"), he said that belief is a heartfelt wish that things be or turn out a certain way; in other words, there is a way things should be and a way they shouldn't be, and belief is a wish that they be the way they "should." Faith, on the other hand, is trust in the truth -- things are the way they are, and that is what there is to work with. In other words, the only power I have is to play the particular hand that I'm dealt and trust that it will work out. In a specifically religious context there is a popular phrase: "The will of God will never take you where the Grace of God will not protect you." While of unknown origin, this phrase is consistent with numerous Biblical passages from both the Hebrew and Christian Canons and points to the essence of faith as trust.
But even if we accept Watts' definition of faith, we are left with some questions. First, faith in what? One might opt for a Panglossian faith that this is "the best of all possible worlds" and go blithely along trusting that everything is OK no matter how awful it seems, or one might abandon faith altogether for belief on the one hand, or, on the other hand, the view that the universe is random and nothing matters, or one might opt for the inflated ego of faith in oneself as the answer to it all, or blind faith, à la someone I knew who said that faith is "believing what you know cannot possibly be true."
My personal choice is faith in God -- not the anthropomorphic God of Western religion, but a panentheistic faith in a supreme power that is at the same time immanent (present) and transcendent, and that is the unity of all life expressed in an infinite variety of ways, moving toward its own realization in that unity being re-established.
I am including this expression of my own faith not because I think it's the right one or the best one but because I need an example for purposes of this essay and would not presume to use anyone else's faith as my example. Which brings me to my point: belief is a one-time event. You decide what you believe, and that divides the world into two camps -- call them good and bad, God and Satan, the way it should be and the way it shouldn't be, it doesn't matter. Even situational ethics or moral relativism does this -- black and white ethics or morals are bad, situational or relativistic ethics or morals are good. In this sense belief is easy -- in the words of a bumper sticker, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it."
With faith it's not so easy. First of all, faith has no proof -- if one is to have faith in "the word of God," the question arises, which word? The Bible, including the Hebrew and Christian Canons, the apocrypha, the discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls -- all of it is rife with contradictions. Belief-based religion is notorious for picking and choosing among the "word of God" to support particular views of what is right and wrong. Faith is, above all, trust -- trust that there is a truth that is only dimly reflected in human beings' attempts to represent it, and that will reveal itself when one is open to its unfolding.
And that trust is not a one-time event; it's a discipline. By wiring and by learning, we are predisposed to the question "is this good for me or bad" about everything in the world, and the "me" in that question quickly becomes "us" -- our family, tribe, nation, etc. In other words, we default to belief, and faith takes work to recover from our immediate reaction and return to the created position of trust and openness to how things will unfold. Also, in my own faith in God, I have to continually remind myself that while God's will operates immanently, God's perspective is transcendent and outside of time, so what appears to be an utter disaster now may in the long view be an important contribution toward the realization of that unity that is God.
So for me the question becomes how quickly can I recover from the latest threat or trauma and resume my discipline of faith, accepting what God/life offers me and discovering its significance (or lack thereof) in the fullness of time, while at the same time trusting that the commitments I have taken on -- to my family, to the world -- are also worthy of trust and that events that appear to be setbacks to those commitments will ultimately forward them, and it is the practice of that recovery that is the discipline of faith and the speed of recovery that is the metric for how much I am growing in faith.
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Valerie Tarico: God's Emotions: Why the Biblical God Is So Human (Part 1)
This analogy demonstrates for me the scholarly view that the definition for "faith" in the New Testament is actually "trust." It has been said that Jesus did not believe in God. He KNEW God.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-gurowitz-phd/beware-the-secular-taliba_b_637161.html
Identification through religion, nationalism or race is not necessary when we meet each other in love, in-truth and not in separation from who we truly are - "god's children". History shows that most hatred and war stems from opposing religious views, territory claims or deemed superiority of race. Nowhere does the true doctrine of any scripture of Sutra support this.
I do agree completely with your second paragraph.
My premise is that we are ALL worthy, we all have the impulse of ‘God’, (English word), within. Suppressed perhaps, however our “journey” if one can call it such, is to return to our true self, or divinity and re-discover the eternal love of God within
In life we have a choice as to how we will perceive its very way of being. All that happens in life is seen, felt, heard, touched, tasted and thus perceived and understood from the way in which one has energetically aligned. We have a choice as to how we are going to live it by the energetic choice we make and therefore the type of consciousness that will be impressing our thoughts and impulses.
If one chooses the temporal way of life, the exoteric becomes a possibility one is at times prepared to contemplate and the esoteric is almost completely obliterated from our conscious awareness. If one is willing to be open to the exoteric as a possible explanation as to what happens in life, the esoteric can be the following natural unfolding step if one is prepared to make the love of the Soul the leading impulse.
The separation from our inner-truth is expressed as the ‘existence’ most people live in the temporal world, rather than a ‘livingness’ when we express from our divinity. The nature of unfoldment is from within by allowing oneself 'to be', not trying to go anyway or transcend to any place
- Huck Finn
Growing up I was told "money is not everything but it is far ahead of what's in second place" but I contested "god is ahead of money" because of being Christian raised. Since my metamorphosis [new birth] I have become atheist and found wisdom enough to live like the animals or many tribal people proves money is not a life sustaining requirement. It has proven money is why man subordinate themselves to others allowing the others to control them.
IT IS EASIER TO SUPPOSE THAT THE UNIVERSE HAS EXISTED FOR ALL ETERNITY THAN TO CONCEIVE A BEING BEYOND ITS LIMITS CAPABLE OF CREATING IT.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley (attributed: source unknown)
Dear Ed Gurowitz
You wrote: "My personal choice is faith in God -- not the anthropomorphic God of Western religion, but a panentheistic faith in a supreme power that is at the same time immanent (present) and transcendent, and that is the unity of all life expressed in an infinite variety of ways, moving toward its own realization in that unity being re-established."
Does your Heavenly Pie answer prayers?
DIVINE JUDGMENT AND THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER -
COMPLETELY IMPLAUSIBLE IN LIGHT OF THE CONSISTENCY OF SCIENCE
Myth-busting, from Galileo to Heisenberg
Matthew Stanley of New York University examines Albert Einstein's declarations about the divine and concludes that he did not believe in a personal God. "To Einstein," Stanley writes, "divine judgment and the efficacy of prayer seemed completely implausible in light of the consistency of science."
And Daniel Patrick Thurs, the author of Science Talk: Changing Notions of Science in American Popular Culture, shows why various 20th-century mystics are mistaken in trying to find "room for spirituality" in the "jostling and overlapping possibilities" of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
http://www.templeton.org/templeton_report/20090528/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation”
What is prayer? It's root meaning is to "entreat". It is to hope, to ask, earnest request.
Science has a lot to offer, but it is strictly selective in it's offering. Not everyone will benefit by the many endeavors of science, in fact, few will benefit by the offerings of science. Will all ever benefit by the endeavors/creations of science? Probably not. I don't see how, if "money is the answer."
Science is as much creationism as is finance, and industry, or religion. It can be justifiably called "intelligent design". Science is an industry, specifically, a financial industry. The same can be said for 'organized religion'. Each, science and religion, are comprised of atheists, and theists.
And than there are those who go it alone. As you have noted they are generally the poor. Showing up at services with pennies in your pocket will hardly get you any more respect that showing up at the local doctors, or lawyers, or corner grocery store. To think or preach otherwise is not only disingenous, it doesn't fool the poor; one could say, it simply soothes the mind of the savage beast.
Oh, and Einstein? He was a believer in predestination, which in and of itself, implies a personal god, one way or the other.
You asked: "Does science answer prayers?"
No. You win!
Of course the fact that science does not answer prayers leaves us with no other choice then to become addicts to voodoo.
The faith most often discussed today is the kind requiring a leap, as in a… "blind faith, à la someone I knew who said that faith is "believing what you know cannot possibly be true."" Indeed, blind faith defines religion itself; it requires a mental leap into believing what is utterly inconsistent with the experience of everyday life; it is the most critical factor in brainwashing; in fact, blind faith is not actually faith, for it dwells in the abyss of fear and denial of what IS, precisely because it doesn't trust the inherent perfection and holiness of life itself. Rather, blind faith facilitates one’s removal from life, from the moment, to inhabit a world of abstractions, all of which erect a shield against the pain or threat that life presents. It's all about control!
Ironically, the self knows it can't control life. Not really. From our inability to stay awake to our first born. And so it chooses to take this leap, seeking psychological comfort in the face of the existential high wire act. Such faith, then, is not faith at all, but its opposite--the lack.
Real faith understands that as far as we can tell, life is a continuity, never starts and never stops, connects us all, fraught with pain and pleasure so fleeting as to seem, quite possibly, unreal, and yet, inescapably, always, eternally present, and for which, we shun credit, as spiritual beings.
preachers take hubris
should read this book at least to this point in order to assess what Dr. Guruwitz writes here.
I don't much like what I am reading. It sounds sincere enough, but for me it manages to confuse
and complicate what in The Wisdom of Insecurity, one of the monuments of 20th Century philosophy, is lucid and simple. Just to read this from Dr. Guruwitz annoys me: "with faith, it
is not so easy. First of all, faith has no proof---." I can't argue with this line, because its issues,
played against what Watts wrote, provides for the critic an embarrassment of riches that overwhelms. Other readers will certainly have their say. I can't help feeling that in the
claims of faith and belief, human claims of course, here something has been removed from one
side of the distinction and moved inappropriately to the other. Faith is not object oriented. Lack
of proof is not its burden, since lack of proof is the ground of its presence in the sane mind.
Nor is faith difficult. We all have it whether we know it or not. We have faith that the sky won't
fall, if one wants to be silly. For me, it is belief that is difficult, and perhaps belief envies faith,
would like to undercut its modest declaration of limits. Here, all of that, to me is scrambled eggs..
You can see people in pretty much every major religion or other sort of cult operating at this level of involvement. They possess an absolute certainty in their beliefs and cannot critically examine them , in fact they often become quite upset and threatened at any attempt to do so.
To quote Wilber again, "Paradoxically the person of faith is often in great and agonizing religious doubt, which the true believer rarely experiences...the person of faith, however begins to transcend mere consoling beliefs and thus is open to intense doubt, which the person frequently takes to be a sign of the lack of faith which worries him sorely. But that is not usually the case." Faith is a step beyond mere belief toward an actual relationship with the Divine and toward authentic religious experience, or as Zen would put it,
Great doubt, great enlightenment;
Small doubt, small enlightenment;
No doubt, no enlightenment.
The dark night of the soul, doubt and faith are essential to any meaningful religious/spiritual experience, in my opinion.
The childishness in the column continues as the author works to destroy each individual misreported component of faith and then claims that his self-appointed victory proves the faultiness of faith as a whole. He changes nothing. Believers continue to believe and skeptics continue their skepticism and Mr. Gurowitz congratulates himself on a nothing well done.
Wow, you say it very authoritatively, so you must be right, but as a father of 4, grandfather of 3, and former Chief Psychologist at a Chidren's Psychiatric Hospital I've never seen a child do either of the things you mention. You must be really smart.
may have taken a cheap shot here, thought better of it when I realized that your credentials in this case might have counted in support of your argument. Then, a minute ago, I read what TexasTim wrote that brought down your answer. The plot thickened. Pea soup in fact. Both of you must be pretty damned smart, and the whole thread, really, is now revealed to be far too rich for my ghostly blood. I do suspect expertise in the world of philosophy and religion on general principles. What are we doing here in the full glare of the public talking about any of this as if we knew beans? Zen does not make that error. It shuns expertise. And we all have a hard time when moving too far afield our grocery lists. I need to make a resolution right now to stay out of the Religion section of HPOST. Fat chance. Like Br'er Rabbit, I'm a patsy for tar babies.
"Faith, n.: belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." -- Ambrose Bierce