Taking a Look at Faith

I have friends who are, at best, agnostic when it comes to things like God and religion. Some believe that religion is a kind of weakness. Some believe that having faith in something that cannot be seen or proven is just a way of believing in fairy tales and whistling past the graveyard. They want to look down upon those of us who believe in something beyond this world as silly and antiquated and somehow unenlightened.

Let me first state that I do count myself among those unenlightened. If there were to be a name applied to me it would be that of Christian. While I have written before of my problems of people who become blind Christians and my problems with organized religion the fact is that I do believe in God and Jesus Christ and all of that. While some of the more fanciful parts of the Bible I feel should be taken as allegory and symbolism I do believe the general heart of what Christianity teaches. What people forget is that the general theme and heart of the part of the Bible known as The New Testament is that God is love and that you need to have faith.

So, ignoring all of the things that go with Christianity and whether or not a man born a thousand years ago was divine or not let's just look at what most religion is. Most religion, in the end encourages you to believe in something that cannot be proven. It cannot be measured and it cannot be laid out on a table and revealed. Most religions also come down to a belief in love. In short it all comes down to faith. This is the part where my friends often have trouble.

Let's look at the idea of faith. Take faith away from religion and look at it as belief in something happening that you cannot control. When you sit in an airplane you have faith that this machine that is obviously very heavy will lift into the air and take you wherever it is you are planning to travel. You also have faith that the men in the cockpit know what they are doing. You have faith that the day they taught take offs and landings wasn't the day this particular pilot was asleep. You also have faith that when you put your car key into the ignition that your car will start.