photo from this site
Journal 4: Faith
The main idea in this section of the course is faith/Faith. You may think that they are the same thing except one goes at the beginning of a sentence, but there is actually a very big difference between them. "faith" is the secular meaning of the word, which is believing in something even though you do not have absolute certainty that you are correct. We can have faith in many things, such as other people, institutions, material things, or ourselves. It is good to put our faith in other people in things and in ourselves, but we do need to be careful. Putting our faith in something like money to bring us happiness can lead us down a path of misery and loneliness.
"Faith" is the Catholic meaning of the word, which is an intellectual assent to a living God and His revelation. This however is a very limited and condensed definition. Also included in Faith is that it is a grace, a natural human response, a risk, a virtue, it is reasonable, certain, and it seeks understanding. The biblical idea of faith includes that Faith is not completely intellectual, but it is more of a loving trust; it involves periods of doubt and struggle; it involves risk and periods of darkness; and it is an ongoing series of decisions.
Faith an also be described as "The Golden Way," meaning it is the means of two extremes: nihilism, the belief that there is no objective truth and that existence is senseless and meaningless, and radicalism, which is stubbornly believing something is true without any evidence to support the belief. Faith, beliefs supported by reason is the mean between these two things.
One major point of discussion in this section was that if a suicide bomber in Iraq, who gave TIME Magazine an interview, was a man of faith/Faith. This question can be approached a couple different ways. One way is considering our condensed definition of Faith and faith and to also consider that faith is based on trust and belief. If we consider this, then he is obviously a man of tremendous faith. He has complete trust in his superiors that they will give him an appropriate mission, and he will willingly do it, even if it wasn’t the mission that he wanted. He believes that he is truly doing the will of Allah in trying to kill as many infidels as possible by sacrificing his own life. However, if we consider other aspects of faith, we might see that he is more brainwashed than faithful. Marwan said that he was completely ready for what he had to do, but we say that faith involves periods of darkness, doubt, and it is a struggle we have to deal with. He seemed completely confident that he was doing the right thing in giving his life. If we take this approach, he might not have as much faith as it seems.
Nihilism is impossible to live out. In theory, it is the rejection of all objective truth. They believe that any institution which claims to profess any kind of faith, scientific, theological, philosophical, or even political, is a waste of time. They claim that everything in the universe is flux, or always changing, so therefore, truth is always changing as well because all truth is relative to the culture and time period. The major problem with nihilism is that they say that there is no truth, but they hold the fact that there is no truth to be a truth, so therefore, true nihilists only contradict themselves by saying they are nihilists.
Radicalism has many different forms, including fundamentalism and fanaticism. Fundamentalists take their holy writings and interpret them literally. For example, fundamentalist Catholics would take the story of Genesis and say that the world was truly made in six days, and that the whole world flooded and Noah, his wife, and whatever was on his ark were the only survivors despite modern science proving these things not reasonably maintained. Fanaticism is believing something so zealously that you become irrational or hypocritical. This is appealing to people because it gives them a sense of security in knowing something is definite and always true. They do not want to face life’s ambiguities, which can cause complications. Marwan, the suicide bomber, can be viewed as a fanatic. He believes that it is the will of Allah to kill infidels that he will blow himself up.
This is a beautiful picture and I think it perfectly shows what faith is. We can cross the rickety bridge into the unknown, into the clouds. It is a risk because we do not know what is on the other side, or if we will even get to the other side. But if we trust in whatever it is which we believe is on the other side, we will take the dangerous path to get it.
A question I will take with me out of this section of the course is if I am a person of faith. Am I willing to take the risk of being thought of as a dork or something else in order to serve God? Can I let my faith guide my decisions and not other pressures of our society and world?
I will try to strengthen my faith in God in using Ignatius as an example and by recognizing that everything on the earth was out here to serve God. I will try to stay away from those things that hinder me from doing this.