August 2015, KJS

Faith is not for everyone: it’s tough to maintain, hard to rationalize; requires daily practice, while amounting to little short-term gain.

Rules particular to each religion present further barriers to faith, especially for modern wealthy societies. For instance, forgiving, loving one another unconditionally, being true, turning the other cheek, kindness – all great ways to get overrun and/or taken for granted in our survival of the fittest society.

This is an especially trying time to maintain one’s faith. Number 1, modern day all access to ‘world-corrupting’ things (which vary to degree per sect.) 2, The element of tremendous means at our disposal, this over-abundance of material options, which naturally pulls one away from reliance or belief on a higher power. We accepted being governed when we needed the heavens to survive – for farming, hunting, persecution.

Today, in the hardest parts of the world faith is still an advantage, but in the parts of the world where people have so much, where they don’t need much luck or hope, faith is fading fast.

Faith to the Poor In the developing world, among the poorest of the poor where religious activity still thrives, there’s a completely different spiritual context.

There, you would think a hard world makes having faith that much harder. Especially when life itself hurts and holds no promise, like for those without justice, money, jobs, arable land, rights, government, freedom, and/or self esteem; not knowing if a meal will come, in what form, or if rebels on horseback in flowing black will strike after nightfall – for them and there are many, this earth must feel like a real hellhole.

To keep a faith that insists this world isn’t just the way it is without reason, meaning there’s something behind it all, something for us when it’s over – is pretty inexplicable on many levels. In one sense it is a survival instinct. In another sense it’s the very definition of faith.

Faith develops in such scenarios because the only other option is reality. Faith keeps you alive and it’s free so it is adopted and spreads. Being contagious and having a compounding community effect it becomes as important as blood and country, itself worth fighting over.

Faith is designed to be hard, to make one stronger. But when a child takes a gun and mows down as many children as he can find as if in a video game, your faith stops and thinks for a second, as if this is as far as it will go. When you experience abject poverty, the life of a refugee running from an ethnic cleaning, see a malnourished child die from malaria or diarrheal diseases, for example, you can’t help but wonder what can really be in charge.

First World Problems For the many people now leaving their known religious affiliation or answering survey questions that God is less important to them, those generally found in wealthy countries, it is easy to see why:
1, Their grandmothers and grandfathers, who they didn’t live with or maybe even near and therefore never knew, are leaving this world.
2, Look around and throughout time, and without going into too much detail, religion has caused a lot pain, damage, unrest, bloodshed, confusion, as a tool for power. How many times can we see the name of God achieve things inconsistent with the idea of God and not have questions.
3, If there is a God, how do you explain all the pain and suffering when I have so much. This is another reason people are leaving traditional faiths because it can’t be rationalized in this context.

If there is One, God has a lot of explaining to do, someone once said. That represents how we feel as mortals. Needing to see evidence is our nature.

Faith is operating without evidence. Religion is something different.

If we could ask Jesus, Abraham, Mohammad, or Buddha, if this is how talking to God should work, I suspect they’d agree we got it all wrong, that it’s out of control because we made it our own. People and their powers make wars and create in-tolerances, not their Gods. Man is ruining faith by turning it into religion.

Thus, faith is wholly different than religion. This makes sense.

After three quarters of a life in that conflict, I can feel the difference.

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