On faith

Faith is being defined as confidence/trust in a belief, person or thing without any proof. It mostly is associated with religious thinking and forms one of the many irritations, due to its lack of proof, to the non-believer who is in search of understanding by upholding the torches of reason and rationality.

But faith goes deeper and is even entrenched within the minds of the most militant atheist alive in a covert and easily overlooked way. There were the atheist will see a refusal of thought, reason of rationality in the faith of the religious, a same parallel can be draw of the atheist having faith in reason and rationality as precursors of purpose and significance.

When questioning creation and its why (“Why did an all benevolent god create us”?) the answers should be found in the very hard question of purpose. Any known sentient being has trouble dealing with the insignificance of its existence and the very core idea life and its sprouting in itself is random and without purpose. It is something which is very difficult to acknowledge and grasp as our minds are wired to search for correlations, explanations, parallels and purpose. The idea of being created by (an) all-loving god(s) not only solves the question and search for purpose of our being, it also ,in a creative way, explains the hard questions how everything came to be and in a simple and easy to understand way. In a certain respect it can be concluded to be actually thoughtfull.

But what if there is a lack of belief in (a) god(s)? The hard question of purpose now remains unanswered and is now being faced with the harsh reality of life actually being random and insignificant. Something our brain is not really capable of acknowledging hence the obvious answer of giving it purpose is chosen. From this point on, the individual will try to give significance and purpose to (his/her) life by upholding various ideals, ideas, principles, practices,…

The once dreaded faith of religion which was but a mere objectification of/for purpose by religious context now became a precursor in search for reason. Faith in the atheistic context isn’t holding the belief without proof of purpose but it moreover became a belief, without proof, in search for purpose and significance.

~ Dimitri