Skeptical Faith

Google Image I recently observed my 74 th birthday. On one level, I feel it. My wife and I joke about our “pain of the week.” Being retired, I have limited contact with people in the “real world.” My memory is not as sharp as it was (although people who know me may say it was never that sharp), and I know that like everybody, I’m a product of my age and see things as someone of my age would see them. Still, I’m grateful to have good health, a great family and a greater level of peace and joy than I had at an earlier age. I try not to let my age define me, and I am not one to think that mine is the greatest generation. I admire young people of today and don’t yearn for “the good old days.” As New York Times columnist David Brooks in his new book, The Road to Character, writes about the mid-twentieth century in which I grew up: “It was a more racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic culture. Most of us would not have had the opportunities we enjoy if we had lived back then. It was ...

Google Image  As a young man I worked part of a summer in a cemetery, mostly cutting grass and pulling weeds. I had to help dig graves a couple of times and I had to bury Mrs. Fogarty whom I had known since childhood. Yet another time while waiting to help with a burial, I had my first and only experience of keening. For those unfamiliar with the term, keening is the wailing – sometimes done by professional keeners – that grieving people in some cultures do at burials. In this case, the Italian widow of the deceased released ear-splitting cries, screamed to heaven and attempted to fling herself into the grave. Such behavior may appear to people outside the culture as senseless and insincere, but it’s one way of dealing with extreme loss.   To me, it’s also an extreme example of the significance of “loss aversion.” The idea, according to Wikipedia, “ refers to people's tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are ...

Google Image Believe it or not, I recently attended my first “rock” concert. Even though the Fleetwood Mac performers are nearly as old as me, culturally the experience was like a visit to a foreign country. Twenty thousand people, from Millennials to Gen X to Baby Boomers, mouthed the words to Mac’s famous songs, many with their eyes closed as if praying. Colored strobe lights were continually swinging around the inside of the giant Pepsi Center arena in Denver. For many, there was no need to pay for a seat since they were on their feet for the whole concert. Many were dancing and swaying. What was obvious was that the performers had the audience’s undivided attention for the couple of hours they were onstage. The whole thing appeared to me to be a sort of religious experience, and I couldn’t help comparing it to “church.” Some of the contemporary mega churches may attempt to mimic concert-like experiences, but most church-goers would see little comparison to wh...

Google Image Although I’m not fond of describing faith as a “mystery,” I must acknowledge that it is, like “love,” a nebulous word whose meaning is difficult to nail down. It means different things to different people and is profoundly personal. Still, there is an objective aspect to faith, something about it that we can share.     Thomas Aquinas, the famous 13th century philosopher and theologian, is said to have written: "To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."    That’s not quite true, of course, because others' insights into faith may be necessary for our own faith to grow. It is true, however, that people who don't have faith in their lives are left scratching their heads.   This blog has covered mostly faith as a way of knowing, focusing on questions of belief vs. non-belief. Although that sense of the word may be fundamental, it may not be the most i...

 Google Image The search for God, to say nothing of belonging to a religion, has its costs. It requires sincerity, perseverance and patience, with oneself and with God. And it requires a determination to go your own way, to ignore the common wisdom and to pray for God’s help – even when you doubt prayer’s efficacy. “Faith is the possibility of re-interpreting what seemed so cut and dried from ‘the world’s’ point of view,” writes Tomas Halik, the Czech scholar I quote often in these blogs. But if faith makes demands on us, atheism and agnosticism have their own burdens. Drew Christiansen recently wrote an article in America magazine entitled, “The Unbelievers, An Overview of ‘Religious Atheism.’” “Religious atheism?” That’s a contradiction in terms, you might say. But it signifies the discontent some atheists and agnostics feel about the dry, cold reality of a godless world and their efforts to adopt the comforting trappings of religion. Some atheists and agnostics, i...