Brief: Faith and What It Means in My World view

This short post represents a collection of thoughts about what faith is, at least from my experiences and discussions with other people in life.

For some people these thoughts will maybe be disturbing because they will be a contradiction to their world view. That’s okay and exactly one of the most important points in this ‘brief’.

My experiences

My family was a catholic household, my father worked for the church and we went to church on every Sunday. We celebrated the religious events and my parents tried to taught me the morals and values behind the belief system. They gave me a model of justification based on their world view. So far, so good. With ten or eleven I started to have chronic joint pain and I asked god for help but no asking brought any improvement. I wanted to believe and to heal, however my world view that I had built up so far got its first cracks.

Until age 16 or 17 I still went to church but only took the parts with me that felt healthy to me. This means for example messages of Christian love. Yet, I recognised that my childlike world view changed to a more differentiated one. Suddenly, there wasn’t anymore just good and evil but all kind of shades in between.

The last times I went to church I often stood in the back in the gallery and felt a strong separation between me and all the people down there, singing and celebrating something I can’t accept as answer in my world view anymore. Do you see the irony here? Because Christianity always taught about how important community is. However, as they are so conservative and avoid reflection of certain parts of their reality, they will basically always force people out of the community. At the same time they are capable to provide a belief system for all the people that don’t want a change in their world view.

Continuing, I started to study in university and met all kind of people, some atheist, some agnostics, some of common known religions. I asked them what faith means in their world view. The answers varied as much as people are diverse in their thinking. Therefore the first conclusion must be that faith doesn’t have a real, static definition like that something is too hot or too cold for everybody at a certain point. The sensory experience may still will be different but that’s a dependency on your physiological sensors, not necessarily on your experience and created world view.

An attempt of a definition

You know the amazing capability of the human mind to be capable to imagine a future, to feel this possible future and act on it? In theory this means that the human mind is capable to perceive all kind of information and create continuously all kind of horrible and awesome predictions. To protect ourselves from a constant extreme dynamic of emotions we are also capable to choose ignorance. To choose ignorance means to actively choose to not know something, to filter something out.

Another amazing capability of the human mind is to tell and remember stories in such a way that they stay in our long-term memory. We are storytellers.

Telling stories and choosing ignorance has nothing to do with facts and truth, it is about passing on a world view.

Therefore I would define faith as follows:

Faith is a cover up story for a chosen ignorance in our world view. This faith, means part of a world view, is passed on by our environment. To believe means to cope with this harsh reality.

Suddentruth

This means faith is a coping mechanism for our emotions, our reality perception.

As always, having only one coping mechanism is quite unhealthy and has the potential to create a lot of pain, either in yourself or in others. A diversification of your coping mechanism is important. Consuming alcohol can help to cope with something in a short-term. Drinking alcohol for every problem is problematic as it does have negative long-term effects. You see, coping mechanisms have different effects, some have fast effects and others show the beneficial effects only after a longer timespan.

Diversification of options stabilises a system as it allows the system to chose the best option for a situation.

Every human in the end has faith because it is part of the world view. They may are not always aware of it. However, we shouldn’t restrict the concept of faith to believe in the top ten stories that are spread around the world. Maybe a person believes in their own story that isn’t shared with others.

Someone may thinks now ‘But I don’t ignore anything, I have reflected every part of my world view.’ and this is a valid thought. One additional amazing capability of the human mind is to ignore your own ignorance. It helps us to stay sane, to be able to act. (You may want to read my other blog post about this topic: To Ignore Your Own Ignorance)

To write down your whole world view is like chasing an always moving rabbit. It is always changing. Only if you are dead it becomes stable but then it is also too late.

One additional remark regarding the definition. If we pass down our world views as stories, they may start as fanciful stories but change into legends, into myths, into belief systems.

Problems that arise through the concept of faith

Faith stories that claim to be an absolute truth and not only a possible truth that helps to cope with the world become hurtful to the world. Just take a look at the history of monotheistic religions, what pain and hierarchical power structures they made possible. These kind of religions destroy diversification in all aspects of life. Again, faith is a coping mechanism that can be helpful but also hurtful.

What happens when different faiths and world views confront each other or for some may even more drastic, what happens when the experienced reality changes so strongly that the constructed world view doesn’t match anymore the experience?

Conflicting world views or drastic changes of reality either enable reflection on the previously ignored parts of the world view or it reinforces the chosen ignorance.

Here I want to bring two examples.

When we take a look at our parents generation we may be surprised about what kind of stuff they believe in but I think we may ignore that they already adapted the world view they inherited by their own parents which may did grow up in the Second World War. Therefore, the world view they pass on will not and cannot be perfect. Their world view will still contain ignorance that you may challenge.

They may try subconsciously to keep their world view stable by critiquing new world views that become more visible in society. Never forget that changing your world view and reflecting on it costs a lot of energy. Sometimes our environment drains all our resources so that we can’t do this anymore in our free time and we may become somehow a little bit happy that we can at least have this part of our world view stable to a certain amount.

Another example is the scenario with the Corona virus.

For almost everybody the rising of this virus meant restrictions. Some were hit quite hard financially, lost their jobs, lost parts of their social group. Some even lost their life and are either dead or live now with additional disabilities. All these are things that have influence on our world view. It reflects to us how little control over our life we may actually have and that we believed the opposite. So, experiencing this loss of control activates on the one side all kind of emotions that we experience as hurtful and unsafe. At the same time it activates our coping mechanisms which will appear in versions that we haven’t seen before.

The situation with the Corona virus is complex and there isn’t an easy solution. However, in a society you will always have people that have different capabilities regarding integration and understanding of complex situations but also regarding how to regulate the own emotions. The fact that there are multiple ways of how to handle the situation can be overwhelming for people. Therefore some may start to believe into stories that match their already existing world view or cost the least energy to switch into.

The stories they believe into makes them either feel more safe or opens an outlet for their experienced anger. They can give their observed things names that took control from them and this believe system gives maybe control, but for sure predictability, back.

Therefore, from a standpoint of how humans regulate their emotions, starting to believe in conspiracy theories but also believing in scientific stories is the way how we experience, cope and handle life.

Epilogue

I am aware that this post isn’t refined a lot. It was one write down, that’s it. However, the concept of faith was something that has always interested me, because just like ‘love’ it is quite vague when you ask people about it. It is something that is passed on via stories and not as facts.

The initial thought for writing this post was that I asked myself whether any other creature actually has a concept of faith and if not that this does most likely mean that faith is indeed something that is made up by and for humans.

Maybe this concept of faith is wrong based on the majority of humans but for me this is the best explanation and definition I can come up with for faith in my world view right now.

“Brief” posts are much shorter posts and don’t try to explain every thought but try to paint a picture.
They are statements and open questions to the reader and not discussions.
“Brief” is the German word for “letter” and English word for “short”. If you speak it out loud, you realise it sound phonetically identical to “breathe”. So, take these “Brief” posts as something to consume, reflect and relax. As a distraction from your daily life.