The Healing Hut, Episode 14
I just published Episode 14 of the Healing Hut. I’ve had 510 views so far of episode 13, and I am so grateful for your support. In this episode I give an update about the struggle with Puget Sound Energy, who wants me to tear the cottage down. I work on electrical up high, remake a door lintel, and put in my last window.
Ramblings Have Returned!
The Problem with Faith
If you are a religious person who has never doubted for one second the teachings of your sect, what I’m about to say, does not apply to you. You have my full respect. However, if you are someone like me, who, by their nature is a skeptic, then what I am about to write may be helpful. I want to examine one of the foundations of religion, including Christianity, and that is the modern notion of faith.
One English definition I found for the word “faith” is, “a strong belief in God or the doctrines of a religions based on spiritual apprehension rather than on evidence.” Faith is often juxtaposed to reason, which depends on evidence, considering faith as good and human reason, bad. This attitude has come and gone over the past two thousand years and presently, thanks to postmodernism, is it at its height again. The mantra of this age was expressed beautifully by Indiana Jones’ statement in his last movie, “I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter what you believe, but how hard you believe it.” Profoundly absurd!
There is no longer oxygen in the Church for the skeptic. Words like “reason” and “science” are the worst obscenities you can dare to murmur within its walls. I know from painful experiences. This wasn’t true just 50 years ago.
This morning I heard Fareed Zakaria review his new book, Age of Revolutions; Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. One of the things he said that no time in history has a country seen such a rapid turning away from religion as America has toward Christianity in the past 30 years. Yes, Europe was de-churched long before America, but the process took almost three hundred years. He pointed out that one of many reasons was the eroding away of Christian foundational beliefs by reason and science. He also added that politics is the new American religion, the belief in something bigger than yourself.
But let me turn this on its head. The problem, as I see it, is that Christianity rejected reason as unspiritual fifty years ago, and it declared war on science, science didn’t declare war on Christianity. Unlike what an evangelical pastor-friend told me last year, science is not the culprit, the instrument of the devil. The problem is that the Church has rejected reason and evidence-based knowledge, and because that is not the way the cosmos is designed, the Church lost the war that it started.
I am not writing tonight to criticize the status quo, but to encourage the skeptics, like me, before you give up on Christianity completely. To the status quo, I’m not asking you to change your mind on reason, but to give us the same respect and grace that we give you. Our relationships with God are doing quite well, thank you very much.
But doesn’t the Bible teach this form of irrational faith? Haven’t we evolved beyond the need for reason, as pop theologians like Rob Bell now claim? Don’t we have a richer spiritual encounter with God when we shed reason and thinking and enter the irrational and mystical as Richard Rohr has built his ministry empire around? When I hear a religious or political leader dismiss thinking, evidence, or reason it is a caution light, warning me they are getting ready to try and sell me something that has no basis in reality and thus no evidence.
If God is the creator of the cosmos, where did human reason come from? Satan? Isn’t the human brain part of this wonderful cosmos? I am convinced that the only system that we have for finding information about that wonderful cosmos, including about God himself, is via our wonderful senses, processed by our wonderful reason. Objective truth. Emotions are also God-given and are also a wonderful part of our psyche, but not intended as the source of finding truth, even feelings that are relabeled as “spiritual.” Doesn’t the Bible say the heart (translated from “psyche”) is the most deceptive thing in all of creation and wicked (Jeremiah 17:9). Isn’t this deceptive, wicked heart the core of the Kierkegaardian subjective spiritual truth? Don’t we live 99.99% of our practical lives rationally? Why would we give up rationality as we entertain a relationship with the rational God?
Biblical Faith
The Greek word for faith, as appears in the New Testament is πίστις (pistis). It is the feminine noun that comes from the word, peithô, which means “persuaded” as via a sound, rational, argument. Totally different from how Christians use the term today.
Dear skeptic, I encourage you to read passages such as Hebrews chapter eleven with this new insight. Replace the word “faith” in your mind with “persuaded via the evidence.” It takes on a new meaning. In that passage the evidence is often the powerful, objective words of God spoken in a supernatural way in history, and based on God’s nature of faithfulness, not to be confused with the subjective “God spoke to me” as used today. Much mischief is achieved under the pretense that our thinking is God-directed.
Looking for evidence does not relegate you to a lessor spirituality as the status quo claims. You are highly valued, at least in my world. You are welcome to come out of the closet in my world and to dine at my table, even at the head of that table if you will.
When we skeptics are forced to base our entire belief system upon a faith that is an irrational leap into the dark (as I was forced to do for over 30 years), it leaves us with intellectual insecurities. Of course, we should have doubts and ask hard questions, the questions that are no longer welcomed within the context of a Sunday school or small group. That’s the real reason Christianity is in such decline, in my humble opinion. Reason is winning, it always does, and if you reject reason, your loose.
From our perspective, faith in God cannot be secure unless we put on the table the option that there is no God or that not all Christian assumptions are true. This is intellectual honesty. When we have certainty in religious things, not based on the evidence, but on social coercion, it leaves us dubious, at least in the quiet places of our hearts. That state is untenable. For this, many feel they have no choice but to leave. My heart-felt mission (and I know I’m swimming upstream) is to give thinkers a place without shame within the Church. Can we do that?
From my observation, conformity is the MO of organized religion, not the honest pursuit of truth. I’ve always said, doubt is the beginning of truth. Jesus appeared to confirm this with his post-resurrection encounter with Thomas. Skepticism is the highest form of worship because it reflects a deep desire for truth. If God exist, truth is his natural habitat. Ask the hard questions. Never give up the aspirations for answers. Luther said, “Love God and sin boldly,” as he reflected on grace. I say, “Love God and doubt boldly and let no one shame you.” There really are answers to pursue.
Mike, the Skeptic.
J. Michael Jones 
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