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Faith and Reason: Why Can’t We Be Friends?
Faith’s bad rap, reason’s inflated reputation, and the nuance of human actions.
Faith gets a bad rap. It’s a shame, really. But like anything that gets its image tarnished over the years, it tends to be because of what its adherents do and say, as opposed to anything intrinsic to it. A great example of this is the Rick and Morty Szechuan sauce incident. A perfectly good television show makes a quirky reference a few times, and its fan base takes it to an unimaginable extreme. In essence, the fans ruined it.
In the case of faith, I see its use by theistic religions (the ones that believe in a single all-powerful god) as an age-old case of “the fans ruining it”. Faith is misused by fundamentalist Muslims to justify their take on jihad, which can be a beautiful concept about the spiritual struggle to which we’re all subjected. Faith is misused by fundamentalist Christians who claim that the earth was created only thousands of years ago, and that homosexuals will rot in hell. Those in the “reason” camp take the bait, and engage in a war of words where the incredible power of faith is discarded like so much wrapping paper on Christmas morning.
Once again, the fans ruined it.
