Blind Faith and Religion

Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670)

I went to the Riverside Church at 6pm and was greeted by the most expensive and theatrical performance of religious rite. I am not a Christian and I have never been. I do not like religion and I am antagonistic to the structuring of faith. I loathe the dictation of morality and ethics under the pantheon of God's spirit and power. The hypocriticisms and contradictions are enough to make one vomit. But hear me - I have been challenged.

I left the church feeling somewhat confused. I did not agree with most of the things Phillip (the pastor) said on stage. He spoke about hope and he spoke about trust in God; he expounded on the errors of humanism - against existentialism - and the virtues of faith. I allowed his words to course through my heated mind - except for his belief in the absolutism of faith. According to Phillip, faith in God is also the affirmation to Absolutism between good and evil, right and wrong. The fundamental binaries within morality enables us to separate between the right-thing-to-do and the sinful wrong-things-to-do. If only he knew the prejudice and inimicalism of ideologies. By positing the Christian faith as knowing the right-thing-to-do, all other faiths must be doing wrongfulness. By valorising the spirit of goodness in Christianity, he siphoned other religions and philosophies into the sewage of wrongful-doers. But perhaps the greatest error in the Absolutism of Christianity rests in the ignorance of ideological murders. The apartheid of racial discrimination entrenched the ideologies of Whiteness and Blackness into the veins of African politics and social discourses. Dichotomous ideologies of colonialism became the heart of darkness that sapped at the poverty and desperateness of the East so as to fuel Ford cars of the Industrial West. The Absolutism of God's faith in which Phillip expounded was and still is the mantra of death for so many crouched in the shadow of Christian righteousness.

But as much as I disagreed with his sermon, I saw a desperateness in the audience of this Pentacostal faith. They wanted to believe and they wanted to swallow all that was offered as spiritual guidance to their lives. I saw arms waiving in the air, affirming their need to know, to believe, to have faith in that which they called God. And to reach God's grace, Phillip stood as the guardian of Its heaven, the interpretor of Its words, and the usher of Its might. For me, this night was a questioning and exposition to the form of 'blind faith'.

For Heidegger, faith is 'absolutely the mortal enemy' of philosophy. Heidegger saw faith as the asphyxiation of epistemic and phenomenological challenges that formed one's existential Being. Faith is a dirty word in the field of philosophy; 'blind faith' is a cancer to the freedom of questioning. According to Heidegger, Christianity and faith is somewhat of a contradiction. Christian theology is a positive science because theology employs conceptual interpretative tools to make sense of God and metaphysics. As such, a methodology of meaning-construction places Christianity within the sciences which tries to understand what and why God is. Christianity and faith is anti-thetical for the science of theology is grounded in questions. Faith does not need to know what or why God is because faith only needs to know faith. In other words, the expression 'blind faith' signals to the death of the senses and turns faith into the only sense that is needed to hear and see God. This re-construction of the physical to metaphysical sensory power effectively eludes any questioning of faith's fallibility. One cannot be attacked for a 'wrong' faith or erroneous faith when faith itself is an unquestionably private experience - a perception.

Spinoza said that faith 'looks for nothing but obedience and piety'. I wish to argue that faith does not look for obedience and piety even if it does enable the act of looking. Faith is a sense - it is a faculty, a perception, a stimulus to sensation and desire. Faith acts as a purposeful organ to seek but needs no other extraneous organs or senses to clout its view. To have faith is to rely on a perceptual acuity that knows God exists; that God is within, near or outside the individual. Such faith is blinding; it turns off our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. Blind-faith destroys all other senses and in turn makes itself the only perceptual sense that could seek this metaphysical Being.

Through this understanding, religion has no hold on faith; that both faith and religion are incompatible even if they may be somewhat interrelated. Religion manoeuvres a structured and ideological pathway for people to understand faith. Religion hopes to direct and temper with the blinding force of faith. People who believe in religion has no faith but only the false belief in the security of boundaries. People with faith need not believe for they already perceive with the senses of faith.

Faith to me has no Absolutism. To state that faith produces the knowledge of 'right' and 'wrong' is to fall into a trap of immiscible contradiction. Remember that faith is not structured by ideologies or discourses of a religious institution. Faith is a perception, a faculty - a sense. That is the power of faith in which no amount of talking on the pulpit may justify.

At the end of the day, I was asked what faith do I have? And faith in what? I answered simply: "I have faith in a journey with no ends." It was perhaps the only certainty that I could mobilise in my life for it is not the goal at the end of the horizon that matters. It is only in the journey that faith and truth are found.