Faith And collective Trauma 2

Faith is a very interesting word. it suggests belief, or an intellectual acceptance of something for which we have no ontological evidence. But there is another meaning. Faith is devoting and adhering our lives and our hearts to another. It is devotion that also implies love, persistence and adoration. This is the meaning of faith that I wish to pursue here. It goes without saying that in order to practice a religion one has to have faith. When I say that I have faith in God, I am implying that I am believing in something for which there is no visible, material existence. If you are an atheist, one could say that I am putting my faith in a fiction, or a mental construction based upon myths, legends and fairy tales for which there is no concrete evidence or credibility. An atheist might even take this a step further, knowing that I am operating on the second meaning of faith: a loving trust and devotion in that supposed, ostensibly imagined reality. This can really get you into trouble in some circles. If you have been to a psychiatrist it can actually be dangerous to be too open about your religious beliefs and experiences. I did this with an allegedly atheist psychiatrist, who responded by putting on my medical record a bogus psychiatric diagnosis as having a schizotypal personality. Of course he didn't tell me, and I only found this out some sixteen years later. Fortunately, no one else who knows about this agrees with his diagnosis of me, and I certainly don't either. Believing or not are certainly matters of choice. And we all have a plethora of underlying issues and needs that influence and dominate such choices. I am not going to try to read the minds or psyches here of those who choose not to believe, except for one little caveat. No matter how many abuses and crimes have been committed by people of faith in the name of their gods, no matter how little actual material evidence exists to give us the kind of evidence of God's existence that would stand in any court of law, at the end of the day there is one unifying principal that all atheists and other intentional nonbelievers seem to share in common: a stubborn and obstinate refusal to accept the authority of a higher being over their lives, not for lack of evidence but because they would rather each be their own little god. I say this because the need, the instinct to believe, to experience and accommodate the spiritual, the numinous, is hard-wired into the human brain. There is plenty of peer-reviewed scientific evidence about this, Gentle Reader. A lot of it has to do with the Enlightenment, which was a necessary corrective against the huge abuses of religion and of humans in the name of religion that were being inflicted on people throughout the dark history of Europe. But as we became more interested in thinking than in the experience of the spirit we became intellectually arrogant, and basically threw away all manner of faith and creed, without seriously considering or investigating what a pivotal place belief and the need to believe holds in our lives. So, reason, and its bastard offspring, atheism, has become the dominant faith. And it is still a faith. Evidence-based? Well, so they say, but really the evidence is often construed across any number of finds, discoveries and resulting theories, that in themselves become orthodoxies because the scientific community is often every bit as orthodox, dogmatic and conservative about their creeds and findings and positions as are the despised religious hierarchies. Neither is it often taken into consideration how much our environment, childhood experiences, education, genetics, economic status, position in social hierarchies, gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, physical and mental health, parenting, socialization, era, generation and other such matters are going to play key if subtle roles in forming us and in turn forming and influencing our beliefs and opinions. Stay tuned....