The Perils of Faith

Among the endless ironies and unspeakable truths of the Global War on Terror, which in turn symbolizes so many of the dangers of globalization, is the similarity of the “opposing” paradigms involved in this conflict. Let me be quick to state: this argument is not about to descend into sophomoric moral relativism; there is simply no useful comparison between Americans and radical Islamists when it comes to treatment of women, tolerance for minorities, etc. We are better than them, and shame on us if we hesitate to firmly say so. There is a disquieting parallel, however, one that is so immune from criticism that “political correctness” does not begin to describe the deafening lack of discourse concerning it. To distill it to its simplest iteration, radical Islamists and most Americans are similar when viewed from afar; both groups order their very existence on expressions of faith. Faith is the biggest threat to mankind in the 21st century.

After the 9/11 attacks, there was an interminable avalanche of assertions from American leadership that Islam was a religion of peace that had been hijacked by sadistic zealots. They earnestly cited a sura in the Koran forbidding self-destruction as evidence that suicide attacks were not justified in Islam. By projecting such authority onto these words, however, these would-be exonerators were endorsing the very mindset of their murderers; they allowed that the Koran was indeed a holy book, written by the hand of God himself, which had simply been misinterpreted. Once one allows that any “holy book” has any authority whatsoever, they are subjected to the ramifications of any possible “interpretation” of the text.

It seems clear to me that God did not create man in his own image, but that, rather, man created God in his own image. One must concede that the God of the “holy books” has some rather human tendencies. One human tendency is fear, and one common element in the monotheistic faiths is the concern with cheating death. The fear of death inevitably leads one to think about how to somehow create doubt as to its universal certainty. Constructing an ideology that seeks to cast doubt upon the one undoubtable aspect of the human existence, death, obviously requires quite considerable leaps of faith.

There is nothing wrong with vainly trying to deny death; it’s the most natural impulse imaginable. The danger lies in the creeping of faith, of rejection and refusal and indifference to evidence, into other walks of life and into other decision-making processes. This leakage is inevitable, of course, as no realm of the brain or the heart can be quarantined from the next.

Does anyone really doubt that President Bush’s willingness to accept possibilities as fact, to treat caution as defeatism, and to interpret clear failure as a trial by fire was fueled, in large part, by his well-documented pre-disposition towards faith? If one constructs his very moral fabric and personal paradigms on convictions that proudly require no evidence, would this mentality not inevitably be evident in his other decisions?

Faith is not required for everyday acts of kindness and for the disposition of people to help other people. It is, however, necessary to commit large-scale acts of murder. Much has been made of the “fact” that the most murderous regimes of the most murderous century were technically godless, but that obscures the point; communism and fascism were ideologies of faith that were fueled, as faith always is, by clinging to myths in the face of either no evidence or of contradicting evidence. Soviet state planners actually adopted an ideology called “socialist agriculture”, in which seeds were planted in comradely groups rather than as autonomous individuals. The problem was that Mother Nature’s ideology of agriculture held that seeds planted in bunches will not grow. Whether the purity of Aryan blood or the benefits of “socialist agriculture”, the virginity of Mary or the resurrection of Christ, faith is recognizable for what it is by anyone predisposed to reason.

One thing I believe deeply, although I cannot prove it, is that the ancients were far wiser than we moderns give them credit for. In many ways, they were superior to us. One cannot walk through Istanbul or Jerusalem or Athens or Rome without at least considering that they were far superior at aesthetic architecture. It is not shocking that some of the prophets and intellectuals of 2000 years ago were granted such credibility for their beliefs; charismatic and passionate people will always attract a following. The shocking thing is that, 2000 years later, the “holy books” are still granted any credibility at all rather than seen for what they are: just a few of many myths conjured in the past, no different in substance than the Canterbury Tales or The Hobbit.

If we transported the smartest person from the Roman Empire 2000 years ago to today, this genius of his own time would be thoroughly embarrassed by a sixth grader in a contest of knowledge of astronomy, biology, chemistry, genetics, and on down the line. Since we rightly see that all fields of measurable knowledge that the ancients possessed was less complete than is ours, why are we still so invested in their spiritual outlook? Why do we assume that people who thought the earth was flat and whose descendents nearly 2000 years later were still burning women at the stake for witchcraft in the most developed part of the world somehow held the keys to the most fundamentally important issues that exist?

Faith is not a style of thought; it is the absence of thought. The most important invention in human history was the scientific method, because it codified how to prove things. Some things, of course, are unprovable, and we must find our own intuitive ways to their conclusions. There is nothing wrong with that. For example, I believe that it was wrong to invade Iraq, although I can’t prove it. The difference between reasoned opinions and faith is that faith is coercive. When two reasoning people have a debate about any subjective issue, neither person will be completely swayed to his partner’s arguments, but neither person will feel the exact same as they did before the debate, either. Not so with faith. If you have faith in Islam, for example, you are required to believe that anyone who does not share your view is damned. And, depending upon how you interpret the word of God, you may be required to kill them. You may even be required to kill them without provocation, without regard to age or gender. You may be required to kill them all for the crime of not sharing your faith.

American faith is manifested quite differently than that of the radical Islamists, of course, but they are fundamentally the same. More Americans believe in angels than evolution. More Americans believe in the devil than global warming. Americans also have blind faith in the supremacy of their system of government. They have faith that the ideal state of the world would be one in which all nations had adopted the American model. How many Americans know that exactly zero nations have adopted the American system? All democracies on Earth, save America, are modeled on the British and French models. In many ways, the behavior of the American leadership and the American public during the run-up to the war in Iraq was a clear distillation of American faith in action. Faith in American supremacy over the enemy overshadowed reasoned consideration of who the enemy was, what the enemy’s intentions were or what the enemy’s capabilities were. For the American government, faith in their moral superiority and benign intentions outweighed the lack of solid evidence for their very justifications for their actions. For the American people, faith in their government outweighed the same.