On The Idea That Faith Is Dangerous
It seems fair that if the NRA can use the adage, ‘Guns don’t kill people. – People kill people.’, God should be able to use it too. And of course we might want to say, in both cases, ‘Yeah, maybe – but they’d have a much more difficult time doing it without you. [Thank you very much.]’ And of course that’s true.
Because the truth is not that faith is dangerous, but that faith is powerful. And anything that is powerful can be dangerous – or at least scary, especially if you’re insecure about your own power.
Faith is inherently powerful. So powerful even, that it can cause a man to give up all his power. (!) And that is what’s actually dangerous: a disempowered human being. Precisely because he, or she, is so much more easily influenced and manipulated by anyone willing to oblige. Hatred and darkness, of course, love to oblige. If the right, or rather the wrong ego gets a hold of them, the person becomes about as innocuous as the sawed-off shotguns and ammo innocently supplied by your local store (here in the U.S.).
This is why the only kind of faith worth investing in is faith in oneself.
Crucially, in order to have this (i.e. genuine faith in oneself), you have to find more to yourself than your ego. For the ego knows the truth about its own power – which is why it is, incessantly, so desperate. Think about all the power and control you have, egoically, effected in your life – all the things you made happen, and all the things you effed up. It’s actually a lot of power and control right? It is. And it truly is. – But now think about how even with all this power, little control you have over what will happen tomorrow, or two hours from now: whether your partner will cheat on you; whether your kid will get sick; whether you lose all your savings because a clique of millionaire-billionaires played virtual games with your money that had the consequence of you losing it all in reality; whether the sun will actually come up.
The ego’s got a lot of bravado (which can and does serve us well in some ways) – but mostly because it knows that at the end of the day, what it has got still doesn’t mean sh*t. So to have real faith, of the genuinely secure, approaching profound and unwavering variety, you need to find something within yourself beyond your ego.
This kind of faith – faith in yourself that leads to faith in something more than yourself – is not dangerous because you are not dealing with a disempowered (human) being. Neither are you dealing with an egomaniacal one – for this human being has precisely detached from the ego’s claim to authority in discovering and embracing an alternate Source.
Yes, I said ‘Source’. Which smells a lot like a ‘G-o-d’. Which is s-c-a-r-y. Be afraid, then, if we must: because turning away will not change the fact that we all end up with some Gods anyway. They are the places we put our faith. And where we put our faith decides whether it will be dangerous in addition to powerful. All the more reason to take a look, have a conversation or ten, and consciously, courageously and deliberately decide what we want to put our faith in. Join me. Click here to read more from On Faith. Or Why You Don’t Live Without It. now.
