Reasoning About "Faith" and "Revelation":

Originally Posted On -- April 19th, 2009.

First let me start off by saying that I am a person with Theistic beliefs, though my view point may be a bit unorthodox compared to the majority of people who may read this. I am not going to go off on a tangent about what I believe right now, because that would take away from the point of this writing piece, suffice it to say if you are interested you can go back and look through my previous content to find out the specifics of my personal spiritual and religious beliefs if you so choose.

I am writing this to no particular audience, no specific religious sect or anything like that, I am writing this to a general audience who may enjoy religious and philosophical debates and discussions. It is my hope not to sway anyone away from or towards a specific way of thinking, but only maybe to find common ground wherever it is to be found.

Awhile back I was driving along and came across a sign for a local church, and that sign read “Reason is the enemy of faith.” Now, this made me feel dejected in the human condition because I don’t feel that reason should be the enemy of faith, I think the ideas of having faith in a supreme power and a set of beliefs can go hand in hand with reason. We shouldn’t just go around having blind faith in things taking it at face value, I believe we should use our reasoning to discern the things we believe in and make sure that those beliefs are rational, lest we go around making fools out of ourselves.

Thomas Paine said in his pamphlet “The Age of Reason”:

“I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”

And later on he claimed:

“Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.

Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.

When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.

When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this — for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so — it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.”

(source: http://www.ushistory.org/Paine/reason/reason1.htm)

The Buddha has been quoted as saying:

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

(source: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/buddha122706.html)

A lot of people base their assumptions and their beliefs upon eye witness accounts and ‘revelations” that have been written down as scripture thousands of years ago and passed down though the ages as truth. I’m not talking about only one religion or only one holy text, I am talking about them all as a whole. I have my own faith in my personal set of beliefs and a lot of the time I do utilize these writings to help me better understand the realm of the divine. But, I keep in mind the fact that these writings were written by the hands of men, and since I was not an eyewitness to their “revelation” I must regard much if not all of their writing with a grain or two of salt. That doesn’t mean that what they have written down isn’t useful most certainly on the contrary, a lot of these holy texts have good advice and morals contained in them. Have faith in your chosen holy book and beliefs, but use the common sense and reasoning that the Divine gave you to keep in mind that since you were not around when these people wrote and said these things and all we have are third, fourth, and fifth person accounts that say these things transpired, we should be at least slightly skeptical about their contents. To have faith in something but also to have a nice healthy dash of skepticism about it, is I think rational and reasonable.

This writing is not a call to Atheism, nor is it a call to a certain brand of Theism, this is certainly simply a call to temper your faith (no matter what it is.) with a bit of reason. Why would the divine give us the ability to rationalize and to reason and to have common sense if it did not intend for us humans to ever use it?

If I told you that the President has declared war on the country of Canada, would you simply take me at my word? or try to find out on your own? I think you would try to independently prove it on your own. So then, why would you try to prove something that happened today on your own, yet take the word of what people wrote down and translated some thousands of years ago? Why take them at face value and not myself as well?

I myself could write a book and claim that it was “divine revelation” from a higher power, from either a certain god from a certain religion or from the ultimate supreme Universal-Divine source. Would you be obliged to believe in my “revelations’? Or would you simply write it off as ramblings of a mad man? If it is the former then fair enough, however, if it is the latter, why? Why write my ramblings off as being that of a mad man yet keep those “revelations’ written thousands of years ago as being actually from a Divine source? Is it because those people lived a really, really, really, really, really, long time ago? And now they’re dead and we can’t ask them? What if I died and no one found my “revelations” for a couple hundred years or so, would you believe in them then? I see no difference in a mad mans writings today and the “revelations’ of the writers of the holy texts from a couple thousand years ago or longer. Those books of “revelation” are as same as the ones we find on the bookshelves today the only difference being the passage of time between them.

The Dalai Lama has been quoted as saying:

“This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”

“All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives”

“If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.”

(Source: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/dalai_lama.html)

Those quotes are to demonstrate that in addition to Reason: Kindness, Love, understanding, and compassion are all important as well.

We can have blind faith in something and be unwavering and alienate ourselves from the rest of our various communities, Or, We can use reason to temper our collective “faiths” and to show understanding, kindness, and compassion to those who think differently than us. I think that if we do the latter then we can help to better understand one another, and would not be so afraid of our differences, in fact I think that despite our individual differences, we could come together as a people in solidarity if we exercised a little reason, kindness, compassion, and understanding and tempered our “faith” a little bit. Like I said faith is okay, I have no problem with faith, however if faith accompanies these other things then I feel as a people we would be much better for it.