Faith: An Examination

Many of those around you would like you to believe that faith is "simply choosing to believe something" or how the piece of Mormon propaganda goes "faith is knowing the sun will rise lighting each new day". Trying to make the argument that "we can't really know anything, so everything is really about faith".

Oh religion... your survival always depends on the belittlement of human beings.

Obviously there is something more to establishing beliefs other then simply making a choice. Other wise there can be critics for what any one believes because one choice is as likely as the other. This something we use to determine if arguments are more valid then the other is called truth. Truth is determined by the degree of conformity with reality.

Perhaps my own personal experience with over coming faith my be useful.

These are the first premises I came up with as I first started to question my faith:

• Whatever I believe it must be sincere.
• Sincerity requires truth.
• A belief in god should be sincere other wise it is simply a cultural prejudice.

When concerns such as this are brought up the faithful have a "solution". In Mormon culture it is called "personal revelation" in others it is probably called something else, but the idea is the same, you receive some kind of "message from god manifesting the truthfulness of religion X and/or god Y".

I applied my principles to this challenge that my religion offered me and this is the premise I kept in mind.

• If my "personal revelation" is sincere then I must know that it is authentic and not my mind playing tricks with me. (religious people should be completely open to this considering that they always question the minds ability).

In short I did not ever get an answer and defiantly not one that I could know for a fact was from God, nor have I ever met some one honestly look me in the face and tell me that they have. They always resort back to "faith".

However the main point I am trying to make is not that I never got an answer so therefore religion is false. The main point I would like to make is about sincerity and its relationship to faith.

All those advocating religion always switch between these two arguments. Faith some times and the "message from god" the other times. However these "arguments" are not compatible.

In order for a belief to be sincere you must know that it is true. If I said I love you but really deep inside I didn't know... I just kind of hope that it was true, then that would not be a sincere statement. So then the faithful advocate "message from god" idea, however if you are going to be sincere you must know that the message was from god, and if you know that the message was from god, then there is no need for faith.

take a moment to sink this in.

Do you now see that faith based beliefs and sincere beliefs are inherent opposites of one another? Sincerity requires and acknowledgement of truth, faith requires nothing. A sincere person does not simply choose to believe something, he examines reason and evidence, he questions everything, he puts in effort, he does not only look at one alternative. Can you honestly say this is what religion has ever done? Has ever advocated?

Can you honestly look me in the face and say religion advocates sincerity?

So what is faith then? It is cultures way of making prejudices seem noble (this is very comparable to patriotism). Faith is not a choice based on reason and evidence but a choice made despite reason and evidence. A choice made as a full on attack on reason and evidence.

Can we not look in ourselves and see what God is? What religion is? What faith is? Fear blocks our minds form examining these things honestly. But when you look deep in... when you truly question yourself and everything you believe, you will find out exactly what these things are... An absurdity created by culture. We created god, now we must get rid of him.