Believers, let’s have a faith-off

Everybody's familiar with a face-off. It's a confrontation. Well, I'm challenging religious believers to something similar: a faith-off.

Bring it on. Your best philosophical stuff.

Let's see who can be reasonably considered to have the most faith – churchless me, and those who share my antipathy to dogmatism, fundamentalism, and other "ism's," or those who profess the traditional religious commitment to a belief in the reality of things unknown.

In my utterly biased opinion, it's no contest. Those, like me, who proclaim a faithless faith are head and shoulders above the crowd of religious believers.

For open-mindedness is a much higher virtue than walling oneself off in an illusory fortress of knowledge, that, in reality, is completely open to attack by arrows of truth.

One of my first Church of the Churchless posts was "Just have faith." Re-reading it just now, I'd say that it pretty much says it all. Such as:

Faith is wonderful.
Faith is all we need to be spiritual.
Just faith. Faith alone.
So we shouldn't have faith in anything other than pure, naked, empty faith.

What is faith stripped of thought, emotion, perception, expectation, imagination? Whatever it is, that's what we are seeking. Such is the message at the mystical core of every deep spiritual teaching.

… Such is a scientific faith, a faith that does not foreclose in advance any possibility about what reality may consist of, a faith not in the unproven pronouncements of some supposedly holy person or book but in one's own direct experience of divinity--or direct non-experience, as the case may be.

I recall several encounter groups that I took part in which included a trust-building exercise. I'd stand with my eyes closed. Other group members would be behind me.

Then I'd lean backward until I fell over, making no attempt to break my fall. It was disconcerting, requiring faith that someone would catch me before I banged my head on the hard floor.

However, I'd seen my companions take their positions. I'd talked with them beforehand. The group leader had explained what we were going to do, and why my trust was justified.

In short, I had a framework for my faith. It was akin to religious faith (except much more valid), because it wasn't really a leap into the unknown. It was a step along a well-trodden path of existing ideas and feelings.

Not what I talked about in "Just have faith." Naked, empty faith. Pure faith. Faith that doesn't require anything else to prop it up.

In a subsequent post, "Don't believe, just have faith," I quoted Alan Watts' view of how one gets in touch with the deepest roots of reality.

The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must make here a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be.

The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

So, yes, I'm ready for a faith-off.

I haven't yet been able to let cast off all my clinging to spiritual beliefs, but compared to religious believers I've got much more confidence that reality will catch me when I let go.

Comments

[Sita]

Thank you Brian I needed that..
Having ''just''faith,like a child even,
how relaxing,how comforting..

[Komposer]

… Such is a scientific faith, a faith that does not foreclose in advance any possibility about what reality may consist of, a faith not in the unproven pronouncements of some supposedly holy person or book but in one's own direct experience of divinity--or direct non-experience, as the case may be.

You know, it strikes me sometimes that perhaps some of us who visit the churchless site are actually not nonbelievers at all, but rather spiritual idealists, who do want connection with god (OK I know this term is utterly and completely loaded), and so much so that they are frustrated with all of the impurities posited by those who claim to have the truth but are in all likelihood living in a fearful, habitual, state of semi-ignorance. For example, I heard Norman Mailer, in an interview before he died, making very good sense. He said he believed in a God doing the best he could, struggling with the universe, and all its forces, to keep improving nature. He also said that he believed in reincarnation, because otherwise, what would we have? If there were only one life, and heaven and hell, and you ended up with 54% good deeds, you'd spend all of eternity in a club med-like paradise, while if you ended up with 48% good deeds, worm and fires for you. I liked Mailer's statements, not because he had the "right" answer, but because the guy was really talking from his personal experience, you could feel it in every word he spoke.
So to sum up, my argument is that I bet most people here, while they might have a physical gag reaction to words like god and the surrounding dogma, I bet many still very much believe and have faith in the possibility of a blissful state which could be called by many names, but have found that much of what people say about the experience actually gets in the way. Is this true for any of you?

[Cyfer]

Brian,

Your the prince of faith. Nobody can have more baseless faith than you have. Your liberal political beliefs have no substaniation in historical fact whatsoever.
Unless you believe they are abject failures. There's plenty data to substaniate that.

[Edward]

Here's the catch, (subtley inferred in the 2005 film, "Constantine,"): even with the experience of knowing God, or your local equivalent, faith is still required.

I am way too distracted by shiney things and donuts to maintain anything like concentration on the one. Watts-ian faith is all that is available under these circumstances. What I believe changes everytime I.... ohh, look! Pennies!!

[Brian]

Cyfer, my spiritual faith may be baseless, but my progressive faith certainly isn't.

Um, let's see: trillions of dollars in budget surpluses when Clinton left office; now we have trillions in deficits that my granddaughter will be responsible for.

Hundreds of billions spent on an Iraq war predicated on a WMD illusion. Scientific hand in the sand ignoring of the world's greatest threat, global climate change.

I could go on and on. Religious faith is based on things unseen. My political faith is very much based on things seen -- all the crap that eight years of incompetent conservatism has brought us.

[Brian]

Edward, I like your style.

[Tucson]

"Scientific hand (head?) in the sand ignoring of the world's greatest threat, global climate change."

--Think about it. Is it likely that anyone understands what's going on with the climate? The weatherman can't even get the weekend forecast right.

"..all the crap that eight years of incompetent conservatism has brought us."

--Well then, how about eight years of competent conservatism?

[Tucson]

Konposer wrote: "I bet many still very much believe and have faith in the possibility of a blissful state which could be called by many names, but have found that much of what people say about the experience actually gets in the way. Is this true for any of you?"

--Yes, I do have faith in the possiblity of a blissful state, and words do get in the way, starting with "blissful" and "state".

[brainwrite]

Dang! See, I'm a "Faithy" like you. But I need dialog! I need conversation. Not literally, but my faithful experience requires it. Thus enters God, because who better to talk to? "God" may be the "true form" or "ideal" of myself, but I still call it God and I still talk to it.

[Benito Darkman]

brainwrite: I think you are it talking to itself? Which is the proverbial dog chasing its tail, but what better to do whiling away eternity? I can think of..

[Catherine]

So would bliss feel like a permanant fountain or explosion? Would it be creamy or bubbly? Is it a state of peaceful excitement? Could I respond quickly in an emergency if I was blissing? If I couldn't, would it feel equally as blissy if my etherish body was dangling in two? Would people benefit through being around me with a flower dangling from my half smiley lips and my eyes turned Jesus-like to the clouds? Would it go on for ever- the same even state of bliss?

I think I would prefer to be the creator of everything to stave off boredom. There would have to be a degree of difficulty, a puzzle, a problem to overcome or rise above, maybe something that would be a sounding board to test my resolve against, so that I could feel some satisfaction after the effort of friction.

I think, give me contrasts, even the interesting catastrophic effects of global warming. Give me a clear understanding of how everything works.

[GRNose]

Is *bliss* a verb or a noun?

Does *bliss* need take place in Space/Time via fleshly brainery?

OK, let's see a show of hands from you dead people; how many ghosts are enjoying Bliss and, therefore, know it is trans-flesh? Come on, don't keep it to yourselves let the living know. (Go spook Brian.)

which is to ask:

Is *bliss* a condition (thing) that is trans-brainery? If so, has anybody heard recently from any Bubbly Bliss-ghosters interjecting wise conversation of their blissness from, let's say, Emptyness?