Faith envy

To continue my ramblings on faith and religion....

In a previous post I mentioned that I am somewhat envious of people who have faith. I know that some agnostics and atheists have a kind of "holier-than-thou" complex going on, feeling that they're superior to and smarter than everyone who subscribes to a particular religion. These are the people who are so smug in their non-belief that they refer to all religious followers as "sheep" and are convinced that no one with any shred of intellect could possibly buy all that crap, hook, line, and sinker. I'm not one of those people. I don't think that it's a matter of "buying" anything, I think it's a matter of choosing to believe in something and having faith that your belief is right.

Note: I am in no way asserting that all religions are good and proper and respectful of the world, just choosing to ignore that particular aspect of things for the moment. I'm talking about pure religion here. Religion as a religion, not as an institution. Big difference there, in my opinion (but again, that's a topic for another post).

I was raised and confirmed in the Catholic church. I know what the basic ideas of Christianity are, and I decided long ago that I didn't believe them (I don't know that "believe" is the right word here, but I can't think of a better way to describe it). That doesn't mean that I'm going to convert to Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, or any other religion, but that I'm choosing not to believe in anything. I believe that we have no way of knowing what else is out there beyond our own experiences. I do think that there has to be something else to life, that we're more than just a complex network of neurons and electrical impulses, but that we have no way of knowing what else is out there. I think that our discoveries are limited because we're only human.

So how does it relate to my envy of the faithful? Well, to be completely honest, I WANT to believe that there's something else. I guess it might be even more accurate to say that I NEED to believe that there's something else. If I were to say that I think there's nothing aside from this world that we experience every day, then that would make me sad. I also find it hard to believe that all of "this" - consciousness, life, the planets and stars - just happened to show up one day by chance. I just don't think that we have the ability to understand and explain where it came from. Our knowledge is limited to our experiences. I don't think that any religion has it right, I don't see how that could be possible.

The faithful don't wonder if there's something else, they KNOW that there's something else. Sure, plenty of people question their religion at some point, but most of them eventually end up with an even stronger faith in their religious convictions rather than no faith at all. Even if heaven isn't a real place, they're content to "know" that's where they're going when their time on earth is over. It's the comfort of a warm blanket to curl up under at night. The world isn't as cold and scary. It just is, and they know that there is something even better to come. Sometimes I just want that, you know?