The sliming of reason

“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has. “
Martin Luther

I believe because I believe – that’s the great turtle upon the back of which rests the world of faith. Faith can’t ask what sea the turtle swims in for fear of running into the absurd, so faith doesn’t ask, faith tells.

It’s Sunday again and every Sunday our local paper has letters from the angry faithful, demanding that the law protect their beliefs from question, or that the law force unbelievers out or that the law be used to push the faith, but it all uses the same justification disguised in one way or another. I believe because I believe; it’s sometimes expressed as “once you believe, you’ll see the truth” which is of course a tautology, a declaration, not a reasonable reason to believe. Sometimes it’s: “it must be true because the Bible says it and I believe the Bible is true.” It’s just another circle, another begging of the unavoidable question, another way of supporting belief with nothing but belief.

Of course amidst all the denial of contrary evidence by the faithful, there’s a ravening hunger for evidence of their own, hence Turin Shrouds, Creation Science, endless pieces of wood from the True Cross or Noah’s Ark, signs in the sky and numerology. It’s a primal hunger that causes the beleaguered believer to ignore the taste and wolf it down, or grasp at the straw that won’t support any weight, if you prefer that metaphor. Nowhere is there an unbroken chain of logic connected to any verifiable axiom other than belief itself: I believe because I believe means you sometimes have to believe lies.

Cracker Christians and Crooked Christian Chauvinists, avoid such discussions and simply get hostile at any attempt to analyze what they proclaim, but Real Christians have to contend with it. Martin Luther, the great reformer, attacked reason itself because all the things one must perforce believe to be a believer are unreasonable, which was his way of saying you have to believe to be a believer, but now that I think of it we have the same vicious circle here, don’t we?

What I’m getting at is not just that Faith is a singularity – something that begins and ends at the same point, but the sheer hubris of unquestioned belief. The point it begins and ends with is always what you want to believe, because after all, you have chosen this belief from an infinite number of possible beliefs. Since the objective of belief is belief itself, you have to enforce faith to maintain faith, disobedience or doubt has to be silenced, hence our friend Brother Martin’s preaching death and destruction for the Jews “The Jews and their Lies” 1543, hence the Roman Catholic Church and its Inquisition and hence the Kentucky Fried Christians and their war on science, secularism and liberal Democracy.