Uses and Abuses of Faith
Faith , although a great concept, is mostly misused
Faith is a great concept. Properly used, it can yield wonderful results. But its misuse is widespread and has caused untold miseries all around the world. This is because people do not realize that instead of God and God’s principles, they are placing faith in the wrong person(s), system or book.
The above can be better explained with an illustration. The example given here is just one of the countless ones which can be cited. It is as good or as bad as any other and need not be taken as this writer’s bias against or for any religion.
There are laws in many states of USA prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution in their public schools simply because it differs from the Bible’s description of ‘Creation’. The proponents of Creation find many lapses in evolution but fail to see numerous obvious errors in the story of ‘Creation’ as narrated in Genesis such as:
1. God could have created the world within a trillionth of a nano-second and would not have needed six days,
2. God, being Almighty, would not need to rest at the end of six days,
3. God would not have given reproductive organs to Adam and Eve if God really did not want them to have sex and beget children,
4. The parentage of Cain’s wife is not even mentioned,
5. God would certainly not have condoned incest even for Adam and Eve, which would have been the only way for them to have ‘grandchildren.’
6. God would not have lacked enough foresight to create at least two couples so that they could have had grandchildren without resorting to ‘initial incest.’
For more detailed discussion, please see UnGodly Genesis
Even if the story of creation were abandoned in favor of evolution, the greatness of the Bible’s teachings would not be reduced by an iota. There is therefore no need to oppose evolution as a likely process through which God might have used science to make the world develop. One must realize that God created even science so there is nothing ungodly about scientific analysis. Besides, if the Bible could be wrong about the earth being flat or the earth being the center of the universe, it could as well be wrong about the process of creation. Similar examples of misplaced faith can be cited from the stories of the other religions also.
Some people develop 'faith' on fulfillment of their desire by worshiping a certain deity at a certain temple, or serving a certain guru and so on. This is result-based faith. Now, if one has faith in, say Hanumanji, that may not be too bad. But having faith in only a particular temple of Hanumanji and not any other temple of the same god is surprising if not ridiculous. Besides, the favors (kripa) received in such cases are mostly materialistic like a promotion, court-victory and so on.
An example, now from Hinduism. Two men used to go to the same temple and became friends. One’s son and the other’s daughter fell in love and got engaged. The grooms family wanted the wedding as soon as possible. The bride’s family did not have the money and would have preferred wedding a year later. The bride's father was praying for a ‘miracle’. The groom’s young brother-in-law died and the wedding had to be postponed until next year. The bride’s father keeps citing this as the 'kripa' (favor) of his ‘god’. Could God have caused more severe grief to another of Gis own devotees through the accidental death and untimely widowing of a young girl just to buy time for the bride’s father? Certainly not. But who can explain that to the ‘devotee’?
A very religious senior gentleman once told me that his salary was meager but 'with the grace of God' he had plenty of 'extra income' meaning bribes. Could this really have been God's grace? If God was gracious to him, would not Ge have made him smart enough to have a higher salary and honest income?
A person I knew once told me that he won a law suit due to his Guru's blessings. Now, if his case was truthful, he should have won without any blessings and if not, did not the Guru do something bad by doing injustice to his follower's opponent?
Some guru claims to be more than 500 years old. He did have a right to live for 100 years but then what? Was he so much in love with his perishable body that he would not give it up? What did he accomplish during his last 400 years? His followers say that he was doing tapasya in the Himalayas for the benefit of sanatana dharma. There were scores of occasions during that period when Hinduism was in trouble. What did the guru do about them?
Another way ‘faith’ is created and sustained is by concocting and spreading stories of miracles.
God, and only God, performs all miracles. It is ungodly to give credit for any miracle to any person howsoever great. Faith based on miracles is no faith at all. Faith does not and cannot need any basis, even that of miracles.
Many people seem to confuse faith with not using our God-given intelligence. It is necessary to clear up that misunderstanding. God granted intelligence to mankind so that we can figure out answers to the numerous questions that come to our minds. We use observation, experience and logic to solve most of the problems we face. But, even successful logical analysis has to start with postulates assumed to be self-evident truths (axioms) not needing any proof. These postulates cannot be proved or disproved. If any idea can be proved or disproved, it cannot be a postulate or a matter of faith.
However, God did not give us unlimited intelligence. There still exist questions such as ‘Is there God?’ or ‘Why did God create evil?’ to which our intelligence cannot find true answers. This is the limitation of not only logic but also faith. The unanswerable questions belong to an area that may be called 'God's Prerogative.'
When the boundary of logical analysis is reached, faith takes over. We then accept certain ideas to be obviously true and base our decision on them. In cases like this our personal preferences, often influenced by our upbringing or the propaganda we have been subjected to, govern our choice of the theories we accept or reject without realizing that the accepted theory is just that, a theory which could as well be wrong. This leads to varying religious concepts and inter-religious conflicts.
However, faith is not a substitute for logic but an extension to it. Therefore those issues that can be decided by logical analysis must not be decided on the basis of faith. Also, as our collective knowledge grows, the limit of logical analysis keeps moving into the areas previously reserved for faith. Therefore, mankind does need to keep revisiting the issues and modifying its beliefs in light of new knowledge as it becomes available. Not using our God-given intelligence where we can is also an insult to God.
For example, the biblical statement that the earth is flat has been disproved and therefore must be abandoned rather than adhered to in the name of faith. Similarly, the theory of ‘Creation’ must be discarded. The Hindu concept that the earth rests on the head of the cobra called ‘Sheshanaga’ is obviously incorrect and must be given up. The statements in Gita that ‘Yagna causes rain’ and ‘The caste system was created by God’ also need to be dismissed as incorrect. There is nothing sacrosanct about such ‘religious’ statements and their rejection does not diminish the value even a tiny bit of the basic principles like truth, love, justice etc. taught by these books.
This brings us to the limit of faith which many if not the most of us fail to realize. There are areas of inquiry, which are beyond not only intelligence but also faith. They should be called ‘God’s Prerogative.’ Only God has the right to ask and know the answers to questions such as ‘What comes after death?’ or ‘Why good people are miserable and the bad ones so happy?’ They cannot be answered even by faith. We are better off accepting the fact that not even the great religious persons can answer them correctly and therefore stop trying to find answers to them. The religious texts claim to answer them but their answers are far from convincing, often misleading and raise more questions.
Religions misuse the concept of faith by making us assume that a particular person or book provides the true answers to all the questions left unsolved by logic. They ask us to believe in Krishna, Ram, Buddha, Jesus or Mohamed or another particular person or book of their choice but not necessarily in God. These people and books raise more questions than they answer. Some of the answers they provide even paint a bad picture of God and are contrary to God’s qualities such as omnipresence, almightiness, omniscience, kindness etc.
Some people insist on publicly displaying the articles of their faith such as the monument to Ten Commandments. The primary devotional act is to implement them in every thing we do in our lives. Display is secondary and need not be insisted upon.
We must learn to distinguish between true faith and fake faith (blind faith). One believes in his or her religion mostly because he or she was subjected to its propaganda during his or her early life. In reality, we have more faith in the person(s) who told us that a particular book is ‘God’s word’ than in God. As children, we rely on our elders for guidance. Having received it repetitiously even involuntarily, their viewpoints get embedded in our psyche. This is called ‘character building’ which is not bad unless it makes us hate people different from us. In many cases, this process tends to be like brainwashing such that one does not need any proof to believe in someone or rejects all proofs against believing in someone.
True faith can only be in God and His principles such as truth, justice, mercy etc. Faith in individuals, howsoever great as human beings, must not be allowed to replace faith in God.
Even the spiritual literature discussing matters of faith resorts to logical arguments. For example, the assertion that the ‘World is an illusion, only God (Brahma) is real’ relies on logical analysis based on certain hypotheses that may not be acceptable to all. Also a lot of the discussion about the ‘original sin’ involves logical arguments. Thus, logic and faith are necessarily interdependent. Therefore, it is inappropriate to downplay logic as being inferior to faith. Rather, a judicious combination of the two is essential for proper development of the individual as well as the society.
Gargi asked Yagnyavalkya a series of questions arising from answers to previous questions. Ultimately, he said that the last question she had asked was such that there cannot be an answer to it. The very first question (“What is there under the earth?”) she had asked was like that but he gave an imaginary answer (“Sheshanaga”) without realizing his own limitation. Now we know that there is no cobra under the earth. All the answers to the subsequent questions he gave were therefore based on an incorrect premise.
Wisdom consists in accepting the limits not only of our intelligence but also those of our faith.
The debate between Shankaracharya and Mandan Mishra was also based on logic and not faith. Faith can only be stated but not proved or disproved like these scholars did. This goes for all of us.