Faith is a terrible thing. It has the same condescending quality as “Because I said so”. To begin any other enterprise, we are required to do our ‘due diligence’, to analyze and double check the apparent facts of a certain case—it is considered the only way to assure that any hidden caveats are dug up and any secrets exposed prior to taking control of a company, institute, structure, or piece of land. Job applicants are questionnaire-ed, interviewed, vetted, drug-tested and mercilessly fact-checked to avoid the hiring of anyone who isn’t a proven entity with known skills. Fairness is in the due diligence. Treating with each other fairly is considered the height of civilized behavior. “Trust me” has always been heard with a doubtful ear (or simply laughter).

But in the one most important part of our lives, the framework upon which we hang our plans, our actions, and our reasons for being, we are told to have Faith. Why? Why should faith be necessary to one’s understanding of one’s existence? “His ways are not our ways?” Well, whose ways are they? Is there a special logic that transcends our logic? Do we live in a world of illusion wherein all things are apparitions, visions without substance? Does the Pope say “Have faith.” because it sounds better than “Because I said so.”?

It is the Catch-22 of religions—whenever a situation seems to indicate our living in a hostile and uncaring universe which no loving God could possibly justify, we are told, “Have faith—God works in mysterious ways.” Nice line, but total BS even a first-grader wouldn’t fall for. It is only by the centuries-long traditions and the masses of people willing to swallow this bilge that we are distracted from the patent absurdity of the need for faith.

Okay, I hear you reactionaries sharpening your pencils—let’s go to the semantics round! To have faith in oneself, have faith in others, have faith in a group one is part of—these feelings are very human, very natural. But they are also recognized as fallible. We can sometimes be betrayed by a person or group we put our faith in—we can even betray ourselves. The faith disappears—faith had been put into the wrong choice. Yet we go on putting our faith in whatever seems most durable and fine. It is a part of the human condition.

An even closer-to-the-mark example would be past religions: the ancient pantheon of the Egyptians in the age of the Pharaohs, the Gods and Goddesses of Greece, and of Rome, the Celts, the Druids, the Transcendentalists, the Shakers, the Millenialists. All these faiths dominated the ‘souls’ of their era, and all of these faiths faded into the past. Even Christianity, broken into different sects, mutated by councils every couple of centuries, haunted by all the Gnostic notions now being unearthed and decoded, which were a part of Christianity but got left out by chauvinists and nay-sayers of the Dark Ages—even Christianity has no immovable bedrock on which to secure a faith in the supernatural. It is a generic term for a hundred different churches, all of which have a history of modification, reform, and argument over the finer points.

Even in Revelations we read of the ‘church’ as the ‘mother of whores’ (which I take to mean as ‘the source of all human corruption’). Our vague feelings of something greater, something unknowable (yes, I feel it too) is all we can hope to have. Once an institution arises, the process of standardization, hierarchy, taboo, internecine politics and facile judgment takes control—in the act of grasping for meaning, we crush that fragile intuition. And the iron-clad mutation that grows into an Institution flies further and further from meaning and closer to prestidigitation (actual and verbal) with every passing day.

When an American is asked to have Faith, he or she can translate that invitation to mean: “Please continue to throw money in the collection plate each Sabbath – we are currently fixing the problem of child-molesting priests and that should in no way hinder your faith in our church.” It’s an awkward position to take and I would almost feel sorry for today’s churches, if they hadn’t such a centuries-long backlog of repression, ignorance, and outright torture to get paid back for. This is the reason for the recent outbreak of ‘militant’ atheism—outrage at a scam that has been part of the whole history of human civilization. I see this as an over-reaction—but I surely sympathize with the sentiment.