But I’m not sure I can.

I’ve talked many times before about my lack of faith. If you define faith as “belief without evidence”, then I can’t do it. Everything I believe is based on evidence of some sort, whether it be the kind observed in reality or the end product of a chain of reasoning. I have certain fundamental beliefs which I would describe as not open to debate and rooted in deep emotion instead of reason. For instance, I need no evidence to go on thinking it matters what happens to people who aren’t me. I also don’t need to be convinced of the logic of pragmatism. I hold that to be self-evident.

But other than that, if I have faith, it operates well below the conscious level. I suppose I must have some form of faith that is a priori to evidence and not dependent upon it. To me, it’s entirely possible that the human mind simply can’t function without some kind of faith.

It certainly can’t operate without any assumptions, despite what Descartes, that intellectual remora eel, would have you believe. And what are assumptions but a form of faith?

So what I lack is not assumptions. It’s more like a foundational layer of belief that everything will be okay. I think that’s one of the major things that religion provide which secular society cannot, as yet, replicate. The devout are never truly alone, because God (by whatever name) is always with them. It soothes our primate brains immensely to imagine that there is a powerful but benevolent patriarch watching over us and protecting us from harm at all time.

That’s why Judaism had to beget Christianity, by the way. God had to become more than just a way to explain the world, or just another petty and capricious tyrant.

He had to become nice.

Now I say I am incapable of faith in that senses, but that is a diagnosis based entirely on how I am and how I think right now. To me, it is entirely possible that a transcendental incident of sufficient magnitude could open my mind up and give me an experience so deep and profound that I must accept it as real, no matter how I got to that point.

I assume it would be drugs. Or transcranial magnetic stimulation.

When I ponder the transcendental in such a fashion, it makes me feel like my intellectual fortress is a puny and brittle thing compared to the enormity of faith. I can understand why the devout pity the unbeliever. They know that they have drawn enormous comfort and strength from their faith, and can only assume that without it, your life has to be one of bitterness and despair.

And they are not entirely wrong.

And perhaps the human mind requires this sort of faith in order to be healthy. I am sure that there are plenty of atheists who are genuinely happy people and would claim to be better off without religion, and they are not wrong.

But there’s a big difference between rejecting religion and lacking faith. I think it probable that once religious faith is installed, it can’t ever be uninstalled fully. You can remove the dogma, but not the underlying emotional supports. Those are the real benefits of religious faith. The rest of it is simply an interface for this deep wellspring of wellbeing.

However, I grew up ignored, neglected, abused, and isolated, and without even the hint of any sort of religious faith to offer relief. Instead, I had my mighty but unmagical mind. I lack that vital ability to synthesize the antidote to my own poisons – to imagine what I would need in order to correct my mood then forget I had imagined it so I can believe it to be revealed truth.

This sort of revelation is anathema to traditional Western thought, which prizes objectivity and detachment and bids us to pursue the truth no matter how it makes us feel. The idea of the products of the imagination being taken as real, even in a purely emotional sense, offends the Western mind and its inflexible delineation of the line between what is “real” and what is not.

Never mind the fact that, as phenomenology teaches, there is no such thing as an experience that is not real. To suppose that such a thing is possible would mean to accept that unreal causes can have real effects, which is clearly utter nonsense.

If someone hallucinates that they are being attacked by wolves, that hallucination is real. It really happened. And the resulting fear, panic, and screaming are also real things that really happened. The error of our poor psychotic is that of misidentifying a mental event as an objective event.

But it makes no sense to describe the wolves as “unreal”. Then what caused the fear, panic, and screaming? To the psychotic, they were very real, and that means that anyone who says the wolves were “ann in their head” is going to be viewed by the psychotic as a lunatic.

Perhaps that’s one of the things animistic societies get right. With an unlimited palette of spirits to call upon to explain things, they need not treat mental events as unreal. They are just a different sort of reality than the everyday reality of the mundane aspects of life.

But without a transformational transcendent event, such things will be closed off to me. And I am not that eager to seek such an experience. My sort of mind tends to suffer from a kind of existential cowardice that views all unpredictable experiences past a certain level of randomness to be madness and chaos and not the sort of thing any right minded person would choose to experience.

That’s what lack of faith does to a person. You end up with an unshakable belief that the universe is inherently malign and that therefore what cannot be predicted and/or controlled can only end in disaster.

Hey, I guess I have faith in something after all!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.