While I warily return...

... to faith, after a fashion.

What it is:

It's colorful, quiet, reflective, sincere, patient, and kind. It's old, tattered, weathered, and sturdy. It's often poor and homely, unrefined, uneducated, and unpleasant. It's diverse and tolerant, honest, tactful, discerning.

It's a need, like eating, breathing, procreating. It can be ridiculed or applauded, but that doesn't change its nature. Just as some folks control what they eat (calories, animal products, lactose), so anyone is free to control their beliefs. What they can't stop doing is believing, just as no one can stop eating (without undesirable consequences).[1]

Belief may be an evolutionary byproduct of a related selective process. That doesn't change the nature of the need anymore than recognizing that flat molars have evolved to help us eat grains.

So they have. How about that.

Or we began eating grains because our molars evolved in a way more suitable to consume them.

So they have. How about that.

What it is not:

It's not the opposite of those things listed above; when it is, it becomes noisy, deceptive, and empty, like so much cotton candy at an amusement park. Too much belief is precisely that.

An aside:

What seems ridiculous today may many years hence be orthodoxy. Like Mormon Jesus Jammies or ritual disembowelment. What's that, you never heard of Jesus Jammies? (First time for me, too. Take a look .[2]

Listen to a Reasonable Doubts episode on Mormonism that discusses Jesus Jammies and other Mormonisms.

Reasonable Doubts blog

Reasonable Doubts homepage on WPRR 

[1]
See tomorrow's post (or the day after).

[2]
I don’t mean to be disrespectful; this term is apparently used widely. Whatever anyone does in the privacy of their own pants is their business. I do think it’s rather silly and about as unrelated to Jesus’ message as anything gets.

Started: 2012-04-08