We constantly hear that religious belief is a matter of faith. In some circles, the word “faith” is used as another word for religious belief.
Ask anyone who believes in God why they follow a certain religion. You’ll inevitably hear the same answer.
You just have to have faith.
This is another way of saying we should suspend our rationality and accept the existence of something for which we have no empirical evidence.
If you’ve read the Proof for the Existence of God, you already know what I think of this idea.
I don’t take the existence of God on faith and no one else should, either.
We see the same problem when certain religions want to use their own texts as evidence that God exists or that it behaves in a certain way to manifest itself in people’s lives.
This simply does not work. If you want to convince someone that aliens exist, you’ll need to use something other than alien texts as proof.
We need to see some concrete evidence or at least some logical reason that doesn’t completely conflict with our the evidence of our senses.
Your religious texts have an inherent confirmation bias that rules them out as a credible source of evidence. Any sane person can understand this.
The same is true of faith.
You cannot tell someone who doesn’t believe in God that they have to have faith in order to believe in God. This is a circular argument.
The person already doesn’t believe in God. The person already doesn’t believe because they don’t see the evidence.
The person might be open-minded enough to question if God exists after all. The person might be willing to take that leap if you only offered some evidence that was compelling enough.
Faith is not that evidence. Faith is the opposite of evidence.
Faith is the wool unscrupulous people pull over our eyes to manipulate us into feeling guilty for demanding evidence.
The worst part of this is that the evidence is there. People just need to be shown where it is and how to see it.
But I digress.
Most of you know I’m a giant Ed Mylett fan. He tells the story of an experience that changed his life when he was a young man.
He got his start as a salesman selling insurance policies. He met with a young couple, husband and wife, and tried to sell them an insurance policy.
The couple had two little daughters and this family was just starting out in life. The couple didn’t have much money.
Ed made his pitch and the couple decided they needed to think about it before they made a decision on whether they were ready to invest that amount of money.
They left the meeting, and that night, they got into a terrible car accident that killed both parents.
The two little girls wound up living with a distant relative who was not the most ideal person to take care of them.
Ed blamed himself for what happened to them. He believes that, if he had only been a better salesman and closed that deal, the girls would have gotten a better outcome in life.
He believes he didn’t understand how to use the right language to overcome the parents’ objections.
He didn’t know enough as a salesman to address their concerns and articulate why this insurance policy was so important.
He didn’t connect the money these people would spend to the one thing that was most important to them—their children’s future.
Now follow the same logic when our friendly neighborhood religious evangelist is trying to convince our hardened skeptic that God exists.
No doubt you truly believe that following your religion is the best thing that could happen to anyone.
You naturally believe that anyone adhering to your religion will incur incredible benefits to their life through their spiritual connection with God.
If you really believed that, you would be morally obligated to convince the person to join your religion. You wouldn’t let yourself walk away and leave the person to burn in Hell.
You only do let yourself walk away because you don’t really believe that’s what will happen.
Compassionate people don’t do that. They don’t knowingly leave someone to suffer, especially not to suffer for all eternity in the fires of Hell.
It simply doesn’t work for you to bombard the person with the need to have faith and then walk away blaming them for not listening to you.
If you truly believed your own dogma, you would tailor your language to their needs. You would address THEIR concerns instead of using your own language—a language they already don’t speak.
If the person spoke Swahili, you wouldn’t blame them for not understanding you when you are speaking English.
You would go out of your way to use language they could clearly understand.
Bill Rice is a pastor whose offers workshops, retreats, and meetings for the deaf population so they can hear the Christian message in their own language.
He saw a need that the deaf community wasn’t being served by the mainstream Christian world.
The same goes for someone who doesn’t believe in God. You can’t use the language of faith to convince these people. They already don’t believe.
You have to use language they can understand. You have to address the core needs and concerns that your dogma is already failing to answer.
The concept of faith has no place in any discussion of religion or philosophy. None of us should believe in something we can’t see or otherwise directly experience. That’s just ridiculous.
The reality is that we DO experience a spiritual connection. We DO experience incredible benefits from adhering to our chosen belief system.
We see the evidence playing out all around us in the beauty of nature, in the lives of others, in good deeds, and in the love of close relationships.
This is the evidence. We don’t have to rely on faith at all—and if we’re honest, the truth is that we don’t rely on it. None of us does. We just fail to articulate exactly what the evidence is.
The concept of faith is nothing but smoke and mirrors. It’s the collection of world religions telling us in so many words, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
Faith is the opposite of belief. Faith is a word people use when they don’t believe in something, but they want desperately for everyone else in the world to believe that they do believe.
If you truly believed in God, you would be able to point to something specific that convinced you it was real.
Faith is the opposite of this. If God is so real, why can’t you point to this evidence? It should be right in front of you.
You should at least be able to point to the positive effect your belief has had on your life.
You should at least be able to demonstrate that you were once lost and depressed and now you are energized, connected, and motivated by life.
This is not faith. Highlighting and pointing out this evidence is the equivalent of a business putting positive customer testimonials on its website.
In the business world, this is called social proof.
It might not be as good as concrete empirical evidence of God’s existence, but it’s better than nothing—which is what faith is.
Fortunately for all of us, this concrete empirical evidence actually does exist. It’s all around us every minute of the day.
If you can’t see this evidence for yourself right now, head on over to the Proof for the Existence of God page where I explain it to you.
Your life will improve a thousandfold as soon as you see this evidence. You never have to rely on faith ever again.
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