Diagnosis: Sanity

Religion is the domain of the human spirit. It is a big boy’s game, unassailable by the infantile critiques of science and merely rational people. The illusion is that the faithful (in the wider sense) are lukewarm; in reality, religion is a calling so high that it necessarily breeds a dialectic of faiths pregnant and bursting with the polar void. Either/Or. Either you have faith (i.e. true faith), or you reflect your self-hatred upon the world (i.e. popular faith). Religion is the great irremovable mirror. Either you define your life by constant change, progression, movement—or you wither into a shell of a human being, you murder the world on the altar of your guilt. You win or lose, you live or die, but there is no in-between, and you will be supremely human on either branch—either angelic or demonic in your humanity.

The secular world, on the other hand, calls for the middle path, the wide road, the reasonable alternative. But we are not called to be reasonable. What is reason, anyway? By most accounts, it is merely enlightened self-interest. And that is the fundamental error in a scientific, reasonable perspective on true religion: the reasonable man regards religion as merely antiquated self-interest; he is the true knower. He looks at the sacrifices to the weather gods, the prayers of petition, the benefits of a unified ethic, an us-versus-them mentality, and his reasonableness seems better suited for his own preconceived, unself-conscious presumption: the primacy of self-preservation.

When, in reality, the truly pious are swirled toward a vortex which they do not even understand, they are blinded by a reality that transcends the aims of reason.

The question is not, “Are we ready to embrace reason?” It is, rather, “Are we ready to forfeit the danger of our humanity?”

The mass-movement of faith is essentially faithlessness. This I will, with God and the heavenly host behind me, concede. Faith, defined by its most popular usage, is cowardice; the driving proof of our faith is not what Kierkegaard described—faith itself—and not as the worldly realists demand—Evidence! Evidence!—but rather, our own emotional need. Hence that conservative fear of knowledge, that attack on freedom. The truth is, we want the world to be as somnolent as we ourselves, we demand that they stop interfering with our dreams as we squeeze our eyes shut in pretence of unconsciousness. Oh, we know the world awaits. We just refuse to wake up.

And yet, have I contradicted myself? (Who cares, really?) Truth, as usual, hides her face behind a veil of incomprehensible complexity, a guise of ever-morphing subtlety that forever eludes formulation. For who, really, is the coward here? (“Cowardice is not the crux of the question, I want evidence, evidence! Down, down, down with the praise of human nobility!”) The Christian, who, though perhaps fearful of the empirical assault, though demanding support for his faith (in numbers, in “proofs,” in signs and wonders—all contradictions of faith, at bottom), still manages to maintain his human ascendancy, believes without seeing, takes that leap of faith which requires indomitable courage and individuality—or the cold, hard scientist who refuses to risk error, falls back in the same way on his ungrounded assumptions, but with an aspect of grotesqueness in his pompous leaning, who refuses to live dangerously and, yea verily, for that loses his soul, his life, his ineffable particularity—his humanity?

Who wins, between these two? I guess it depends on the game. The atheist loses his soul but gains the world: his precious, concrete, scientific (subjective, debauched, infinitely contingent) world. The believer? Ah, just turn the table and pour God into the adjectives.