A Man of Faith
(the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen)

“Have you ever been married?” he asked.
“No, I never have. I guess I’ve been too busy.”
“Ever been in love?” The question was direct, matter-of-fact.
“Halfway, half a dozen times. But”-- she glanced at the nearest telescope-- “there was always so much noise, the signal was hard to find. And you?”
“Never,” he replied flatly. There was a pause, and then he added with a faint smile, “But I have faith.”

-Carl Sagan, Contact

When I was-- oh, call it five or so, maybe younger-- I had a dream. This was obviously a long time ago, and the specifics escape me now, but the point is that in my dream, my brother died, and then I did too. (Looking back, this was probably due to an ill-advised Sunday school lesson. Though the Cain and Abel parallel with my brother and I is a little creepy.) I woke up crying; I don’t remember if I called out for my mother or not. I can’t really say what lasting effect, if any, that would have on the average kid, but for me not a day has passed since then that I have not thought about death. While other kids were worrying about what to wear to school or whether or not so-and-so liked them, I was worrying about sickness and dying and the destination or my immortal soul, assuming I had one. (Of course I was also worried about what to wear to school and whether or not so-and-so liked me, so you get an idea of the stress I was under.) I know everybody thinks about this stuff. I don’t believe, though, that most people think about it all the time, especially before puberty.

Understand, I almost never get sick. I can count the times on my fingers; once every couple of years, if that. I try to eat right, I exercise daily, I take vitamins. Apart from heart disease, mostly brought on by poor nutrition, my family history is not particularly troubling. My relatives are actually pretty long-lived.

Yet most of my closest friends know that almost every night before I go to sleep, I wonder if I’ll wake up the next morning. The few people who’ve actually slept with me (admittedly a pretty small demographic) know that if I my arms are across my chest, if I can feel my heartbeat, I’ll never get to sleep because I won’t be able to stop listening to it. This is for the simple if ridiculous reason that if I can hear my heartbeat, I’ll spend all my time worrying that my heart will explode.

What’s troubling is, that’s not impossible. That kind of crazy shit actually happens in real life. Healthy people in the prime of their lives up and die for no apparent reason. It sucks, but it’s true. And you don’t know it won’t happen to you, too. Or that you won’t get into a car accident. Or that the guy behind you on the street doesn’t have a knife. You pretty sure, but you don’t know. The simple fact of the matter is that any one of us can die, unexpectedly, at any time. We just assume that we won’t. We assume that just as we woke up this morning, we’ll wake up tomorrow, too. We believe that. This is something that you and I and all of us take on faith.

There are a lot of things like that.

The subject of faith is one I’ve been meaning to write about for some time, since it’s something I reference frequently and something I take very seriously. I hadn’t originally intended to lead in with my obsessive paranoia about my own mortality, but it’s appropriate enough, since any discussion of faith is usually a discussion of life and death, mostly death. Faith, you see, tends to get tangled up in death, because faith is about the unknown. We are born, we’ll live for a time, and then, by some means or another, we’ll die. That’s for everyone. And none of us-- I don’t care who you are or what you read in some book somewhere-- none of us know why. At the end of our lives, if we were given a chance to sit back and think about it, we could probably pin down most of the basic questions: who, what, where, when, and how. These are questions of fact and science and history. But there’s not damn one of us who could say why. The why of our lives is a question that we never get the answer to.

Now that really sucks, because I think most people, if they had that chance, would also tell you that the why is the only part that they really cared about. The rest is just filler material, but the reason, the motive or purpose behind it all-- that’s the real story. There’s a lot that we don’t know, or haven’t known through the ages. You can get through life not knowing what makes the sky blue, or the composition of the moon, or how many licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop, but no one wants to go their whole around forever not knowing the reason for their own existence. So while faith gets tangled up in death, really it’s about life, and the meaning of our lives, and that’s something that we can never know for sure. So we come up with an answer that makes sense to us and we hold on to it as tightly as we can, because chances are there’ll come a time or two when that answer is all we’ve got. We hold onto it because as long as we’ve got an answer to that great big question, the unknown has no power over us. We decide a meaning for ourselves. That, my friends, is the origin of faith.

I’m going to pause here to discuss a very specific form of faith, since it has a bearing on how people are going to read all this. When most people think of faith, they think of religion. But I don’t consider that to be entirely correct, and I want to explain why. I come from fundamentalists. They don’t call themselves that, or think in those terms, but let’s call a spade a spade: my family are old-time, Bible-beatin’, church-lovin’, fire-and-brimstone Christians. They’ve never condemned anybody to hell, because they’re too polite and they’re not idiots, but they’ll tell you if someone’s going there if you ask them. They have very strict beliefs, always have, and they raised their kids to share them.

But here we run into a problem, my biggest problem with the whole institution of religion. Ultimately, even if I despise your beliefs, as long as you’re not a dick, I’m willing to let bygones be bygones. (The only exception being astrology, which is just stupid.) However, religion offends me on moral grounds. I place a high premium on faith (we’ll get into “in what” later), and I consider the any attempts to organize and codify it antithetical to its basic purpose. Faith is an inherently personal thing. Its value comes from what it means to you, not what it means to other people. You cannot share a revelation, anymore than you can share a dream or a feeling. You can try, certainly, and I think you should. But it’s not like a drawing or a painting or a song, where if you’re really lucky and you know what you’re doing, you can put almost exactly what’s in your head out there in the world. No matter how much you talk about if or how you try to express it, your faith can never mean the same thing to someone else as it does to you, and unless they come to it on their own terms, it won’t mean anything at all.

I’m fine with the idea of a group of people who share common beliefs coming together to talk about or celebrate those beliefs. However, you have to be really careful, because everyone has a little control freak in them (some of us more than others), and eventually somebody is going to stand up and say “Okay, if you’re one of us then you believe this, this, and this, and you don’t believe that, that, or that.” And the second you do that, the second you put strict parameters on it, you’ve gone and taken away the thing that made it worthwhile in the first place. And then it’s not a faith, it’s a job, a requirement. Something else that you have to do. There’s nothing holy about it anymore.

But, one might point out, if you don’t offer some definition of faith, then labels become meaningless, and you have no way to distinguish one faith from another. Fair enough. However, my thing is not to take away labels or definitions, it’s to oppose artificial restrictions on what is supposed to be a natural part of our existence. Let me put it this way: I love comic books. And like most people who love something, I like to talk about that thing. Say I’m talking to a friend of mine who also likes comic books. Maybe we don’t necessarily like exactly the same books, or artists or writers, maybe we don’t see eye-to-eye on a given genre or what’s going on in the industry, but on a basic level we both share a love for the medium. That’s great. And maybe we want to get together sometimes and talk about comics. Wonderful. Until my friend starts making rules. He tells me that it’s only okay to like certain books, certain artists, certain writers. I have to like this and not this, read that and not that, and if I don’t, I’m not a fan, not really. At that point, I tell my friend to fuck off, and I find someone new to talk about comics with, because this guy is clearly an asshole. I just wanted to discuss the new Daredevil, he wanted to go on a power trip. I don’t need that.

That’s what religion is, as an institution. It’s a form of societal control. It’s the people in power, the people who want to decide other people’s lives, exerting control by pigeon-holing faith into a tight, clearly defined box. Our beliefs, whatever they may be, should lift us up, not hold us back. They should enrich us, not force us to live someone else’s notion of what our life should be. I’m not preaching relativism; that’s not a philosophy, it’s a total absence of conviction. I’m simply saying that even within a supposedly shared faith, there has to be room for each individual to find his or her own way, or you’ve completely missed the point. Never mind that I disagree with the belief; my bigger problem is with the structure.

So. Like I was saying, I was raised to believe in a very specific religion, and I did until I was a teenager. I was a good kid and I didn’t know any different, so I believed as I was told. And because I didn’t know any different, it never occurred to me that my faith was inherited, not earned. I never experience a personal revelation, or at least not one associated with Christianity. When I hit 11 or 12, and I started my (thus far) lifelong struggle with depression, I found myself in a mindset where I could start questioning things. As I did, I found that the beliefs I had been raised with were fundamentally incompatible with the world as I had come to understand it. For 50,000 Ibo infant lives, God would not send rain, but I was supposed to pray for the family business? Jesus said “Love thy neighbor” and “Turn the other cheek” but his alleged father will send someone to hell for not worshiping Him? As I examined my parents’ beliefs, they became ridiculous to the point of being offensive. Yeshua may have been a great man, but an examination of scripture paints Yahweh as a petty, vindictive monster. The just and loving deity I had always heard about showed no sign of itself in the Bible or anywhere else I could see. If God existed, clearly He had no interest in any of us, on any scale. By 13 I had stopped talking to Him. By 15 I had stopped believing altogether. It just seemed so ridiculous.

(I understand that even among the small group of very forgiving people who actually read this shit and still talk to me afterwards, I’m not winning any friends with this line of thought.)

Now obviously I know that not all Christians believe as my parents do, and that even those that do are not automatically stupid, or foolish, or ignorant, just as my parents certainly aren’t. And I know that Christianity is not the only religion out there. Most people do believe in a higher power. There is a way for rational, sane, intelligent people to believe in a god that answers personal prayer in the richest country on Earth, and ignores famine and disease in the Third World. And perhaps, had I been allowed to discover it on my own, I might still be one of them. But somehow I doubt it. Perhaps there’s another world, with a guy that looks like me, same name and all that, singing hosannas, but everything that makes me who I am is incompatible with the whole thing. I just don’t see it ever working for me. I said my last prayer a long time ago.

I personally am an atheist. I am opposed to religion, opposed to worship, and I consider the idea of any deity to be both false and unnecessary. I do not believe in God, or gods, or anything related to them. I do not believe in the supernatural, in fate or destiny or even luck. There are things in the world, in the universe, that I do not understand, and you don’t either. But there is a reason for all of them. (Not a purpose, mind you, but a reason.) Everything that is exists and can be explained, understood, or at least recognized within the parameters of the natural world. There are unseen forces aplenty, but they are not alive, and do not care about us.

I am an atheist. I’m terrified of death, and I fucking well should be. I do not believe in an afterlife-- heaven, hell, purgatory, reincarnation, any of it. Everything that I am, everything that makes me me, came into being with my birth, and it will cease forever with my death. Let the species last for a billion years, or more; once I die, I’m gone for good. That makes death extremely scary and life extremely precious (moreso, I think, than if you view your whole life as an entrance exam for something else). I don’t believe that I was created, or that my life is part of some larger plan. I, like everyone else, am the end result of chemicals and coincidence and time. Given the age of the universe, and the laws by which it operates, consciousness in one form or another was pretty much inevitable, if not here then somewhere else. I don’t matter on a grand scale, but I have value nonetheless, because more than any star or planet or particle in the cosmos, I am unique. The idea that we-- that all of this-- are simply creations, makes everything seem so... plain. The world is old and mysterious, but it makes more sense to me without a god than it ever did with. You can keep your holy books; I can appreciate the wonder of the universe and the value of my own life just fine without them.

Now this whole long aside is simply to tell you where I stand on the matter of religion. Atheism is not a belief system. It is not a faith. (We’re getting back to that in a minute.) Atheism is a rational rejection of the idea of religion and the supernatural. It is not a belief, it is an absence of belief. I don’t have faith that god doesn’t exist, rather I don’t have faith that he (she, it) does.

Alright, so going back a couple of pages (see, if I were really a writer, we’d be done by now. I’m just a guy who likes to ramble and happens to be very prone to doing it in print), I was talking about faith being a way of coping with the unknown, which is really just another way of saying that faith is hope, though a much stronger form of it. Faith is hope taken to the point where it becomes an absolute certainty to the person who holds it. It’s more than just wishful thinking, it’s conviction. We take something that we don’t know to be true and we operate as if it were. And that’s fucking important, because without that, we don’t get through the day. There is so much in this world-- in every aspect, every level of our lives-- that we simply cannot know the answer to. We’re constantly grappling with the unknown/unknowable. “What should I do with my life?” “Does this person really love me?” “Am I making the right decision?” “Is this what’s best for me, and for my loved ones?” We don’t know the answer to those questions, but we think we do, and so we summon the courage to plow ahead, where we might otherwise be stuck in indecision.

It’s important to understand that faith is not the same thing as trust, though the two are related, and we sometimes use them interchangeably. I think of trust as occurring on a lesser scale. It’s more of an assumption, something we question less than we usually do faith. For instance, I trust that the guy in the car will stop for me and the other pedestrians as we cross the street. I trust that the woman at the cash register is giving me the correct number of pennies in change. All things considered, that stuff is just as uncertain as the deeper, metaphysical questions I’m always worrying about, but I don’t think about it as much because it’s usually fairly trivial. We say we have faith in people, but we really mean we have trust in them to act rationally in the day-to-day. Whereas on more important stuff, like “Is my spouse cheating on me?”, we say we trust them, when what we really mean is that we have faith in them to not sleep around. We worry more about that sort of thing, because it’s bigger, more important. That’s why everybody questions faith. (Almost everybody, at least.) This is a semantics argument, but an important one.

I remember a discussion I had with a friend a few years back, in which I argued that almost every significant change that takes place in the world does so because of romanticism. She disagreed, which I always thought was strange, since she was a romantic herself, though she would never have admitted to it. My position was that it takes a romantic to say “This is not the way the world should be”, and to try to change things for the better. But looking back now, I think that that’s not really the whole truth. A romantic has a dream of a better world, but it takes faith to bring that dream to life, or even to really try. Faith is where you test the hypothesis. “Can I make the world like I think it should be?” We all want to do that on some level. And I promise you, the people we think of as leaders, or heroes, or legends, are the people who succeeded, and succeeded big. It takes courage in your convictions to try to make a difference, because the odds are not on your side.

That’s why I say that I view art as an act of faith, of devotion. I have an image in my head. I’ve got the idea that I’d like to change this portion of the world into something else; clay into sculpture, words into story, paint into painting, that sort of thing. Lot’s of people have that idea. Everyone thinks about the great novel or song or picture they’d like to make someday. But it takes a lot of faith in that idea and in yourself to actually go through with it, and it’s not easy. I question my faith. I hate most of the art I make, and I wonder if I’ll ever make something really lasting or meaningful. I question my ability to put my idea in the world. Nevertheless, I keep trying, because my faith happens to be very strong. I believe that this is what I’m meant to do, even if I don’t always know how to do it right. That’s a metaphysical question that my faith has given me an answer for.

But you all knew that. I talk about it all the time, and really, is there anyone reading this who can imagine me doing something else? Probably not. I make quite a show about my conviction. (And of course, since I do question my faith, I wonder who exactly I’m trying to convince.) What we want to know now is, what else do I believe? What other impossible questions have I dreamed up answers for? Where else do I put my faith?

I had intended, right up until now, to share some of that with you. I could go on and on about it. I have faith that someday I will find someone who loves me as I love them. I believe in the power of rationality and compassion over ignorance, superstition, and fear. I have faith in the power of one individual, in the right place, at the right time, and through the right actions, to change the entire world. Stuff like that. Or even smaller stuff, like how I believe I can survive my financial troubles, no matter how bad they get, or that certain friends will stick by me forever. I don’t know any of that for certain, and I can’t until all question of it has already passed. I take is as a matter of faith. It gets me by.

I had intended to go on and on, to really examine my faiths and where they come from and what they mean to me, but now, here, as I sit in my apartment and I near the bottom of page six, I realize that A) no one wants to endure all that, and B) that’s not what this essay is really about anymore. My whole point has been the importance of real, honest, and most of all individual faith in coping with the uncertain and more often than not very scary parts of our lives. How then can I reasonably sit here and talk about my faith for another three pages, when I don’t really believe it has anything to offer anyone else beyond show and tell? Faith means nothing to you unless you came to it on your own.

I think, instead, that if I’d like to do anything now, it would be to simply ask anyone who’s still reading to think about what faith means to you. Really think about it. What are your beliefs? Where is your faith, and in what? You don’t have to tell me; I’m not fishing for comments. I’m just asking, because it’s important, because it’s something everyone should think about. Thinking about it, examining it, and questioning it is what strengthens it, what makes it valuable and meaningful. What are your beliefs? What gets you through the day? What answers-- and what questions-- do you think about when you lie in bed at night?