According to one dictionary definition, faith is “complete trust or confidence in someone or something”. There were, of course, many other definitions of a religious nature, but that’s not what I’m thinking of here. Or rather, not exactly…
A little context: my father’s first wife was a devout Catholic and she raised her sons accordingly. From what I’ve been told, it was mass every evening and Sunday school every week. When she died, unexpectedly in March 1952, the boys were ten and seven and (again, from what I’ve been told) they ran pretty wild without her restraining hand. Accordingly, when I came along my parents agreed that I wouldn’t have religion pushed down my throat, as it were, and aside from school carol services from age five to eleven, I only set foot in church for family weddings and funerals.
When I did think about religion, it was pretty obvious to me that there were some intractable contradictions in the Bible stories, the greatest of which was that an-knowing, omnipotent, all-loving deity continually allowed so many terrible things to happen. As I grew into my teens and twenties I basically dismissed religion altogether as intolerant claptrap. Frankly, I still do… but as I grew older and thought more about the world surrounding me, that it just happened seemed as unlikely as it being created by one deity over the course of six days. So, I began leaning towards the notion of some vague organising force, or spirit… and that’s about as far as I’ve got. To be fair, of the Ten Commandments numbers 4, 5, 7 & 8 are pretty good rules for a reasonable lifestyle, but that’s about it.
Moving away from the purely religious, I used to have a reasonable faith in the basic goodness of mankind, but over the past decades that’s been seriously tested and heavily eroded. There are still many, many good individual people in this world: governments and religious establishments… increasingly not so much. People I do have unquestioning faith in are my friends. They may be few, but I trust them unquestioningly, and they know this.
9/11/22
