Faith is often presented as a virtue in our society. I think it could more accurately be understood as a vice.
The term "faith" has two definitions in my dictionary: "complete trust or confidence in someone or something" and "strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof."
Faith can be an undisputedly good thing. I understand the merits of having faith in yourself, for example. Believing in yourself is the only way to create the life you want. I like the meaning of the popular saying "faith moves mountains," although I think a better word would be "trust"—trust moves mountains– because the word "trust" implies that something has given one reason to have conviction in it, and if they have that prior proof, little can hinder them in achieving a difficult goal.
But faith can also be a bad thing. What is the inherent merit of believing something with no evidence? Or, the flip side: refusing to believe something with ample evidence? Why is unquestioning faith considered such a noble thing to have?
Our emotions are capable of clouding or entirely severing our reasoning in certain situations. Consider a starstruck woman who refuses to believe that her partner is cheating on her even though all the signs are there. She believes him when he professes his loyalty to her and she rejects the warnings from others who have proof that he is having an affair. She has faith in him despite the lack of evidence and the profusion of evidence to the contrary.
Our emotions can be so strong that we can confuse them for the truth. But truth, an objective reality, should not be conflated with our subjective feelings about it. Just because one feels like a worldwide pandemic isn't a big deal doesn't mean that millions haven't died from it. Just because one feels like they are the sexiest person in the universe doesn't mean they are. Just because one feels like their God is the one true and correct God doesn't mean he exists. And so on.
It should really disturb us all when there are verifiable facts about something but people simply refuse to believe it. Timothy Snyder, in his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, writes that "you submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case." Summarizing Victor Klemperer, a German scholar and diarist who lived under the Third Reich, Snyder wrote that truth dies in four modes: open hostility to verifiable reality, shamanistic incantation, magical thinking, and misplaced faith. I want to discuss one of these in detail here: magical thinking, which is the "open embrace of contradiction" such as you find in notions like "the vote is always rigged, and you should vote for me anyway" and "Black people are taking the vote away from white people, although American history show that the opposite has been the case."
On magical thinking, Snyder writes: "Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer's descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to 'abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer's greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.' Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler 'has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.'"
Unwavering support of a leader is a dangerous type of unwarranted, blind faith. When you trust someone, you will tend to trust everything they say. For example, I know people who understand nothing about the greenhouse effect, greenhouse gases, and other mechanics of climate change, and yet believe that global warming is a hoax because Trump has said (multiple times) that it is a hoax. I know people who don't believe in the severity of COVID-19 because Trump has repeatedly downplayed its seriousness.
Many of those people consider themselves to be open-minded and free thinkers, but seem not to realize that the majority of their opinions are just copied and pasted from their tyrannical idols. When asked to give sufficient evidence for their beliefs, they will stutter and stumble. They will either regurgitate something their idol said, or get defensive and call you a snowflake/idiot/heathen/dumbass/sheeple. The real reason they believe what they believe is because they have faith in the person who said them.
But if you have pursued your own research and investigated something using reliable sources that care about truth (or at least, human rights), then please know that you are not a snowflake/idiot/heathen/dumbass/sheeple. You are instead a much-needed light of reason in a cultural context that could easily slide right back into where we were in Nazi Germany. It was only the blind faith and permission of millions of humans that allowed Hitler to rise to power.
Looking to Nazi Germany, in On Tyranny, Snyder writes, "Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share. Post-truth is pre-facism."
Kurt Vonnegut said, "Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!" Timothy Snyder said, "Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant." A lesson learned from history. But have we learned this lesson?
Blind faith is a danger and a threat to our society. Please, for the wellness of yourself and the world: form your beliefs upon verifiable facts and evidence. Read, research, and discuss. Don't automatically believe anything anyone says, no matter how smart or charming or powerful they are.
The pursuit of evidence is more noble than having faith.
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