Regarding the matter of faith, it is commonly felt and often stated that faith is a weakness, a mere substitute for knowledge, a “blind belief in dogma” and “unnecessary.” But the point overlooked is that there is an element of faith in every conscious act. It is another of the false aspects inherent in all consciousness: the presenting of objects in such that the perception of them necessitates inference about what is hidden. This is in fact an aspect of faith. Without this faith nothing can be done at all, viz. faith that things will repeat themselves and happen as one expects. But the case is most clearly seen in the case of death. Death is an obvious fact. Described in terms of life, it is meaningless (like a blank featureless wall, or a black chasm to vision), but nevertheless by its very existence, by its basis in experience, necessitates inference about it. The three main inferences are that life of some sort continues after death, that it does not, or plain agnosticism. Whichever I adopt is a matter of pure faith (I leave out “evidence” for and against other alternatives here). But I cannot avoid adopting one of the three.
On the other hand, faith about, say, “phoenixes rising from their own ashes” is simply this same universal attribute of consciousness applied to a fantasy, an assumption (the phoenix) that has no basis in experience. What is unnecessary here is not the faith but the assumption. Now many faiths place faith in baseless assumptions. And when people discover this, they not only reject the assumption (rightly), but, because they fail to discriminate, they deceive themselves into thinking that they can do without the faith too. All that has happened to them, though, is that they have transferred their faculty of faith to the basis of experience and have simultaneously forgotten that they are using it. Now to forget that one has a sharp knife in one’s hand is dangerous.
The world is like a zoo where there are no spectators, only animals in cages - some can move their own cages from inside and sometimes they play at being spectators.
Nanamoli Thera
People seem to approach religion for one of two reasons or for both mixed together: They are moved either by a wish to discover truth (leaving that vague word vague here) or by a need to find justification for a predilection. Of the first, an outstanding example is, perhaps Kierkegaard. The second is far the more common. In myself I find elements of both. Perhaps the two merge with incompatibility of two lines that meet at right-angles and from the meeting point some set out in one direction and some in the other.
