Faith as an Emotional Crutch

Faith can be a crutch that others use to control you - control the length, weight, and scale of the crutch and you can make the user comfortable, uncomfortable, or throw them into pain.  But if you have strong personal faith, you control your own crutch and it becomes a tool rather than an instrument to keep you hobbled.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith” when I mentioned that I believed in reincarnation.  I pointed out that there was a chance that I was wrong and that I held onto this belief out of a need for a religious crutch to help me deal with reality.  He asked what I’d do if tomorrow reincarnation was incontrovertibly proven wrong.  At the time I said I didn’t know.

Having thought about it some, I can now honestly answer the question a little differently.  If reincarnation was proven wrong tomorrow, what I’d do would depend greatly on my psychological state.  If I had moved beyond the need for this particular emotional crutch, then I’d let that belief fade away and nothing would replace it because nothing would need to.  However, if I still needed the crutch, that particular belief would fade away in the face of unrelenting logic and science (as my belief in a Christian God did long ago) but would then be replaced by another emotional crutch of some variety.

To some extent, all faith is an emotional crutch.  Faith exists to give us something that resembles certainty in a universe that is far from certain.  Faith exists to explain how reality can be simultaneously appalling and amazing.  Faith exists to provide meaning to a universe that is fundamentally meaningless.  Faith gives hope when you need hope.

And faith, in some ways, may be the only thing that keeps people going.  Not necessarily religious faith, but faith that tomorrow will be better than today.  Faith that you can change things for the better.  Faith that your own abilities are sufficient to achieve whatever task you’ve set yourself or have been set by others.

Religious faith scares me, because I believe religions exist to tell you what to believe and how to think and so they are inherently oppressive.  Religious certainty scares me even more, because not only is it oppressive, it brooks no dissent and it’s willing to kill to protect itself.  Personal faith, even personal faith based on the teachings of supposed prophets hundreds or thousands of years dead, doesn’t scare me.  Personal faith is fundamentally personal and doesn’t interfere with the lives of others.  Personal faith gives us strength without requiring that we drag others down in order to give us an illusion of strength.

I personally would love to see the crutches kicked out from under the arms of the religiously faithful and certain, sending them tumbling.  But for those of us with personal faith, our crutches are no different than those used by the physically injured - they give us the support we need while we rebuild hearts and minds that have been wounded, or they aid us in the transition from one part of our life to the next.  Sometimes we cast our crutches aside, other times we carry them along with us in case we need them again.

For the personally faithful, our faith, our crutch, is just a tool that we use.  Our crutches do not use us.

I love philosophical/religious discussions. I believe it is healthy to reassess what you believe in and why every once in a while (too much though and you spiral into perpetually recursive navel-gazing). 

“New Atheism” is the up-and-coming fad on the internet forums now and Richard Dawkins videos and articles are populating Technorati.com. One of the main talking points that are used by these outspoken atheists is that the faithful hobble themselves by using these spiritual crutches and that they would be stronger - morally and emotionally - if they dropped that dead weight and took greater responsibility for their own philosophy and actions.

Theists, on the other hand, argue that religion makes them stronger then they would ever be on their own - faith gives them reserves of strength and hope that they claim would be absent without their beliefs.

I believe they are both right. Religion is both a burden and boon. As you alluded to above, religion is a tool that can be equally used or abused. And for some, it holds no usefulness. For others, indispensable.

As for myself, I lean agnostic. I’d be an atheist except for one thing: Being agnostic is more fun. It’s more entertaining to leave open the possibility that there is something a magnitude greater then what we can comprehend. If I had to write a bible the first line would be “The universe is greater than the sum of its parts.” The same way a composition is greater than the individual notes that make it up or a human body is more than a collection of cells and a living cell is more than its arranged atoms.

But is it really? Or would a more logical and fruitful policy to live by be “What you see is what you get”?

Beats me. But it’s sure a lot of fun to postulate.