I am confused by the evangelical Christians I went to high school with. They think you should only have to give what you want to the poor, not what the poor need, and to be forced to do otherwise is wrong. Jesus said "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven..." (Mk 10;21 NIV) They forget that except for God's Grace, they too could be destitute, like those they hold in contempt.

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Faith and Reason

By Richard Girard

I have been getting reacquainted on Facebook with some of the people that I knew in high school, and it is interesting how forty years and changed us all.

One of the things which so markedly distinguishes so many of the people I knew in high school, is their adoption of a very conservative Christian doctrine.

There are very few friends of President Obama among the people I knew in high school--not that I blame them, President Obama has been a disappointment to myself as well. But they seem to almost universally believe the claptrap about the President being a "Communist, Muslim, and Illegal Alien," all of which have been disproven as outright lies made by individuals including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump, and Ann Coulter. There are lots of valid reasons to dislike and distrust the President: the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty; the lack of Wall Street "Banksters" doing hard prison time for almost pulling the world into an economic collapse worse than 1929; the failure to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan completely by 2014, as promised during his two Presidential campaigns; his failure to fight back against the Republicans who have been sabotaging his administration since the night of his inauguration; his failure to get a better deal for the American people with regards to the Affordable Care Act, aka, Obamacare. No human is worth the stress and effect of negative feelings that hatred engenders, certainly not Barack Obama. As I pointed out in my September 18, 2008 OpEdNews article "Illuminating Dichotomies," hate is not the opposite of love, apathy is. Hate is love turned inside-out and upside-down, and this distortion of love causes us severe emotional problems at the very core of our beings.

Hatred is caused by fear, and its handmaiden, anger. As Franklin Roosevelt stated, "The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself." Almost thirty years ago, when I was having a severe crisis of faith, I met a Buddhist monk from Tibet, in the bookstore of the Unity Church in Boulder. I think it was obvious from the books I was looking at that I was having a crisis of faith Perhaps my experience that day was an example of the classic mystic's experience, "When the student is ready, the teacher will find him."

As I spoke to him, he saw the books I had been looking at and asked me if I was having doubts about my faith? I answered him, in a cynical tone of voice, that yes, I was: I could no longer reconcile my beliefs about God and the inherent, if flawed, goodness of humanity, with my reason, which saw so much evil and corruption in the world. He then gave me an idea, a concept if you will, which I have kept as my personal mantra for almost thirty years:

"You doubt because of your fear, and you fear because of your doubt: have faith, and be unafraid."

These words hit me like a thunderbolt, and I sat there stunned. In that moment, this man had distilled down all of my troubles with my conflict between my faith and my reason, and had presented me with an answer that was so inherently right that I recognized that it was capital "T" Truth the moment I heard it.

He went on, "We all have faith: sometimes it is in ourselves; sometimes it is in others--family, friends, members of our religion; sometimes it is in a thing--abstract things such as truth, or love, or reason, or power. Sometimes our faith is in concrete things: the words of a book, our religion, our nation, or all of humanity. And sometimes our faith is in the Unseen and Unknowable, what most of humanity calls God. A wise man discerns that life is an endless cycle of faith, doubt, and either reaffirmation of that faith--if the subject of our faith is worthy--or finding a new subject for our faith if it is not."

Fear is the great destroyer of our lives. It prevents us from accepting a changing world with new ideas, ideas that others might have that differ from our own experience, but are none the less, valid. When we hold onto our "faith" out of fear, when we demand certainty in the place of faith, it ceases to be faith, it becomes idolatry.

When our "faith"--in ourselves and those we love; our system of beliefs, abstract, concrete, and metaphysical--meets the fear that we might possibly be living a delusion, or even an outright lie, and we do nothing to examine ourselves and our system of beliefs, we cross that dangerous line into neuroses and psychoses. For those times when we must examine our faith, we have been given the gift, even if it is rarely used, of reason.

Good mental health is an uncompromising dedication to discovering the truth about ourselves and the world we live in. These truths are not always pleasant, and the journey of "self-discovery" is fraught with perils and false starts. We owe it to ourselves, and those that we love, a promise to continue an ongoing journey of self-discovery, and with it, a continuing questioning of our belief system. From this journey comes that rarest of all gifts: wisdom.

We are often told by overzealous religious authorities that we should "fear God." But only a tormented mind can fear something, and "love" it at the same time. I believe that the word which has so often been translated into English as fear or dread, is better translated as "awe." And I am in awe of God. I am also in awe of children, truly beautiful women, great literature and thought, and most of all, in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, John Coltrane, and the Beatles, especially that of Beethoven. To be in awe of is, according to the dictionary, "a mixed feeling of reverence, fear, and wonder," For me, the emphasis is on reverence and wonder.

I most often experience awe as the effect of "practicing the presence of God," often in meditation or prayer. But occasionally, I am able to experience this as a shared experience with those around me. When this happens, it is at one and the same moment, one of the most difficult, and most rewarding experiences that I have had in my life.

Certain religious authorities attempt to maintain that they have a "one size fits all" solution for a joyous afterlife. Just believe their religious dogma, and all will be well. The problem arises because their dogmatic system does not permit the questioning of that dogma, and threatens you with eternal damnation if you do not believe as their dogma commands. They command certainty in their teachings, not faith in God.

It is because of their irrational, dogmatic system of "faith" that these religious authorities must use fear to establish, maintain, and control their flock. The fear of going to some fiery Hell, fear of being separated from your loved ones in the hereafter, fear of being some part of the unworthy who live outside their flock of the "elect." Ultimately, their argument can be boiled down to a very simple statement: If you are not with us, you are against us, and ultimately against God. To be against God is, to the religiously inclined, is the greatest fear of all.

I believe not in the Fear of God, but in Loving God. I believe in loving God with every fiber of my being. For me, God is both Transcendent and Immanent: beyond the furthest star, and closer than a whisper, all in the same instant. I experience God in: the nighttime sky; the laughter of children; the lady bug who lands on my hand; the smiles of my friends and family; when I take a deep breath in the morning and smell that afternoon's rain; in the song of every bird; in every sunrise, and every sunset. The Gospel of Luke 17:21 states "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," and that to truly love God is to love all of Creation, which, like the masterwork of any great artist, contains so much of the Artist within it.

Years ago on PBS, I saw Henry Fonda playing attorney Clarence Darrow in a one man show, which I believe was titled "Clarence Darrow for the Defense." Mr. Fonda ended the show with a quatrain from Omar Khayyam, which expresses both the poet's love of man, and his service to God by serving man:

"That I be written in the Book of Love,

I care not so much for that Book Above:

Erase my name, or write in it what you will--

That I be written in the Book of Love."

I hope that I am in the Book of Love. I believe that Book is the One that God truly counts.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'