The thing about faith is...

The thing about faith is that it is a matter of faith!

There are a whole lot of reasons not to believe in the existence of any kind of gods. A lot can be explained about the way people act without needing any reference to any sort of outside power or influence. At the same time many argue there are outside forces, benevolent or otherwise; intelligences and creative forces beyond the material world as we experience it.

Whenever a person enters into a discussion about the non existence or otherwise of a deity they enter it from a position of either faith or unbelief. Though some claim to hold an open mind, even they are coming at the question from either ‘I don’t know if there are gods’ or ‘I don’t know if life can be explained without positing the existence of something beyond ourselves’ coloring their thoughts. Neutrality is impossible.

The atheist, the agnostic, the believer…they all have positions to defend and places that they are coming from. Where they are coming from partly determines what they are looking for and the answer they are hoping for.

'Faith' is a term that can be applied as much to an unbeliever as a believer and all those in between. The atheist has a 'faith' in their rational abilities as being able to reveal absolute truth. The agnostic has 'faith' that an answer can’t be known. The believer seeks to state that certain things can be known that reveal the existence of something beyond them selves.

This partly explains why religious discussions can become so personal. A person’s identity is so integrally tied up with their belief system that to threaten their system is to make a personal attack upon their whole reason for being. Value judgments are automatically brought into play.

As an example consider the question… “If there is a God then why is there so much suffering in the world?”

A whole host of presumptions are in place.

• That the god proposed has the capacity and intention to intervene in peoples lives
• That the god proposed is related to some form of moral code
• That the god in question has some reason for paying attention to the plight of people
• That such a god is constrained to act in rational ways
• That such a being can be understood by human enquiry

Such a question also implies that suffering of necessity has to have a logical cause. What if suffering just ‘is’? ‘Suffering Happens’. Period.

The question of “God’ is dragged into the question because of the assumption that for God to be God (and therefore to exist) then he, she, or it, has to have the ability and compassion to want to intervene in human affairs… rather than being a two headed pixie on a distant planet who is far more concerned with the pool game she is playing to give a fig about events on a spinning globe whirling around a distant sun.

An atheist may declare that the existence of suffering makes the idea of a benevolent god seem ridiculous. An agnostic may declare that it makes the claim of god being a good god open to question. A believer in a benevolent deity may suggest the suffering is evidence that there is a need for us to allow the god who is there to intervene in human life.

Again it comes back to faith. The thing about faith is that it is a matter of faith!

Reflections on a Bad Judge

Luke 18:1-8 Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: "In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, 'Grant me justice against my adversary.' "For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, 'Even though I don't fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won't eventually wear me out with her coming!' " And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"

What I’m thinking, where this parable takes us, is to consider that faith, real faith, has very little to do with getting God to do anything or even God getting us to do certain things. That faith is really about allowing God to be God and allowing ourselves to ‘live and move and have our being' in God. That persistence in prayer has little to do with asking and asking and asking, but has a whole lot to do with resting in God’s love and accepting ourselves and the situations of our lives as only finding meaning through their relationship to God.

In the parable, what creates the situation that causes the woman to ask, ask, ask, ask, and ask again, is the character of the unjust Judge. So, Jesus explains, God is completely the opposite of such a judge. God is ready to help, always does the right thing, and is way above such a tawdry character as the unjust judge.

The implication is that if God is not like this bad judge, then we don’t have to be like the widow, whom can only get things done though incessant talking. That we have a God who elsewhere is pictured as having every hair on our head accounted for and knows intimately what is going on in His Creation to such an extent that even if a little sparrow falls to the ground it does not go unnoticed.

By picturing for us a bad relationship, the parable attempts to push us to consider what a right relationship may look like. We laugh about nagging wives and retreating husbands, because there is part of us that realizes that although that’s not the way relationships should be, that’s the way they sometimes go.

Putting it in that way, opens the door then for us to go beyond the kind of relationships built upon asking and receiving, towards relationships that are built upon accepting and believing.