Tags
Bible, Catholic, Church, Cicero, Decision, Dostoevsky, Faith, Freedom, Friendship, Gandhi, God, Loyalty, Marx, Neil Gaiman, Nietzsche, Pledge of Allegiance, Protestant, Religion, Theology, Will
Dostoevsky contended in “The Grand Inquisitor” that we human beings want nothing more than to give up our freedom to a cause, and to defer responsibility from ourselves – even for our own lives and personal decisions. We are, at heart, all followers. And I believe this is true in our day as well, but I’m not sure if that’s the primary problem with our culture. We are, by and large, informed, literate, opinionated, convicted people, with our own set of axes to grind and causes to champion. We are sharply individualistic. And we are trained – by the media, if not by our teachers and parents and history – to suspect authority. We are taught to reject convictions without examining both sides – we are trained to look for the “other side” to any discussion or dilemma. We are trained to withhold judgment until all the facts are in. Which is why it is so difficult to talk about faith in a contemporary context. Faith is fundamentally about subsuming oneself in the service of something greater than ourselves – admitting that our judgment is inadequate to properly understand or govern our own lives. So the question I mean to address here, and in the rest of this series, is whether or not one can intelligently and deliberately practice loyalty – the art of subsuming oneself to a greater power – without contradiction or blind (and therefore corruptible) faith. Is it possible to avoid the extremes of apathetic skepticism on the one hand and indiscriminate devotion on the other – to find faith as a process both engaging one’s reason and discernment and also rationally, carefully suspending it?