Respecting Faith

You have a reputation.  You hope that it is a good one.  Most likely it’s mixed, some good, some bad.

You care.  You care how people perceive you, think of you, look at you.  Yes you do.  Be honest.  Everyone cares.  We like to be well thought of.  We want to be respected.  We want it and expect it.  Some more than others, but there is a degree of it in all of us.

What is respect?

To be given respect is to be believed-in, to be trusted; to be acknowledged, to be seen as a person of value, worthy of attention and consideration.  It is to know that others have faith in you and believe in you.  That they have regard for you and trust you to be a person of worth, to count.  To be someone who is some ONE in whom people have faith.

To be dis-respected is to be summarily dismissed as unworthy.  To be given no personal acknowledgment.  To be given no place or position in the world.  It is to be held with no regard and given no esteem; to be nothing, absolutely nothing, to be worthless and useless in the eyes of others—a non-person, a no-one—a person in whom no-one has faith.

So if you want to “dis-” someone, tell him that you don’t trust him.  Tell him you don’t have faith in him that you can’t believe in him.  Tell him that he has no value and that people are better off without him.  Tell him the world would be better off had he never even existed.  Indeed, take it a step further and tell him that if he must insist on asserting his right to BE, then he is to blame for all the evil in the world.  Then tell him that he is a joke.  Laughable, if he weren’t so culpable.  Tell him that you could never put your faith in a person like him.  (Or tell “Her,” for this is a gender neutral point.)

Now, say all that to God.

Say it with all your heart.  Pray it.  Pray it in earnest.  Pray it with a feverish pitch of conviction: “God is nothing!  God is worthless.  God is useless.  God has no value and no significance.  God is not to be trusted.  I have no confidence that God is good or just and fair.  Indeed, I blame God for all the evils of this world.  God is laughable.  I have no place for God in my life.  I will not believe in God.  I give no acknowledgment to God’s place in the universe!”

To reject God is as much a faith-statement as to believe in God.  Everyone readily agrees that it is on the bases of faith that one accepts that God IS and is worthy of trust, a “someone” that should be believed-in.  Few readily recognize that it is also on the bases of faith that one asserts that God is NOT and/or is not worthy of our confidence or trust, as one who can and will and should make a difference in the world, let alone our own personal lives.

Faith matters and it is a matter of respect.  Yet, it is too easily dismissed.  How so?  It is all to often falsely assumed that the religious person dismisses intelligent reasoning in favor of passionate faith while the irreligious individual calmly chooses cool rational logic over emotional trust.  Passion, trust (faith), emotion, as well as reason, logic, and rationality are used by everyone, religious and non-religious alike.

Faith matters because faith is required in all relationships.  And faith in God is also a viable relational dynamic.  A healthy working faith requires good evidence and trustworthy patterns of consistency and dependability.  In short, faith requires the good use of one’s mind and intellect.  Hence, we are not presuming a blind faith, a faith that willfully goes against absolute evidence to the contrary.  Nor, on the flip side, are we presuming that reason alone can provide us with perfect knowledge in absolute terms.  Hence, faith matters and it is a matter of respect.

In short, there is no one that does not exercise faith in their logic, or in their reasoning, or in their assessment of reality.  Likewise, contrary to popular attitudes, there are few who totally check-in their minds at the door of faith, as if rationality and faith have nothing to do with each other.  Faith is as necessary to rationality as knowledge and understanding is as necessary to applied faith.  Faith matters.  It is also a matter of respect.