What’s Wrong With Me? #4

I have no faith.

I wish I did. I really do.

I would love to have that kind of confidence.

This isn’t just some kind of anti-religion thing, either. This is an every thing.

When I say that I have no faith, I don’t specifically mean that I have no faith in God. What I mean is that I have so little faith in anything that I don’t even have enough faith to have no faith. I can’t even commit to being an atheist.

It could be that some part of my embryonic brain never developed correctly when I was a fetus, or some crucial gene expressed AAGG when it should have gone CCGG, or who knows what got screwed up, but the end result is me, and that can be a real pain in the ass at times.

The way I see it, there are two kinds of faith. Two aspects.

One aspect could be described as an overriding belief or trust in the validity of anything. Of course, I have to be able to muster up a reasonable amount of this first kind of faith. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to masquerade as a functioning adult in our society.

I have faith, I believe, that if I go to work at my job and do it reasonably well, I can expect to be paid for that work with a piece of paper, call it a “pay stub” which in turn suggests that a certain number of other, different pieces of paper, which we can call “money”, or at least an agreed upon electronic representation of this “money”, will be electronically placed into my bank account, which is in itself an electronic and imaginary thing until such time as I go to the bank and demand some of that paper money. I will then have faith that I can take that paper money or perhaps a piece of plastic that represents the possibility of that paper money, and exchange an ink impression of that plastic card or a few select pieces of paper money for foods that I assume I will be alive to eat in a few days time.

It’s mind-boggling how many intangible agreements and rank assumptions are being made in that convoluted series of behaviours.

And maybe assumption is a better word for that kind of faith. We assume that everything will more or less be the way everything generally appears to be most of the time, and so we are able to carry on with the activities that we assume will get us through it all.

And most of the time, we are correct enough in our assumptions to keep it all going.

The kind of faith that I find much harder to understand, the kind of faith I can’t find in myself is another, more meaningful kind. The kind that runs in tandem with that first kind, but goes much deeper.

That second aspect of faith looks from the outside like an underlying sense of cosmic certainty, a belief in some unwavering dependability at work in the universe that some people find second nature to rely on at a gut level. Some get that feeling from religion, others from science, others still from the mystical energies of shiny rocks or telepathic aliens with rectal probes.

I don’t get it from anything.

I look at the people who have that feeling and I think about what they must think. .

Those faithful people appear to have a deep-seated certainty that they’re making progress towards some meaningful end, aiming at something much greater and more valuable than just robotically responding to stimuli, acting out the behaviours necessary to fulfill the needs of all those basic assumptions I was talking about. They feel like they are part of a Plan, like there’s more going on here than meets the eye, like things are being taken care of at a very macro level.

Call it God, the fundamental laws of the universe, Fate, Destiny, whatever. It ends up in the same place, but where does that all come from? How do those people who have that kind of faith do it?

How can they believe that there is some skein of meaning holding everything together when so much of life is random and confusing?

Why do they see order and pattern and hidden infrastructure where I see formless, meaningless chaos roiling just out of view?

Why do they experience a universe that makes sense while I live in one where the only way to make any sense at all is to dig it out for yourself?

The problem has to be in me.

I’m not able to see Karma at work. I don’t see nice people being rewarded and kindnesses being amplified through the world.

I see people being born into hopelessness and strapping themselves with explosives to try and find in their deaths the meaning that has escaped them in life.

I see vicious old men who have lived hidden for decades as pedophiles and predators while many more good hearted people get sick and die young.

They see a God Hand reaching out and pointing The Way where I see fingers pointing in every direction and no direction and all of the fingers I see are on the hands of men.

It looks to me like we are born into a world that people have made for us, where we are raised to see only what they want us to see, and then, if we’re lucky enough and smart enough to tear it all down, we find out that there is no reality. There never was. If we’re clever enough to ask the right questions and at least try to find the answers, we learn the truth:

Reality, life, everything you will ever see or hear, the past, the present and the future, it’s all something that we have to build for ourselves. We have to wake up every day and fight to scratch some kind of pattern into the random formlessness that explodes around us every millisecond of every day of our lives in order for us to have any reality at all.

That’s what I sense to be the truth.

But I don’t believe it.

I can’t.

Because I don’t have any faith.