Faith and Confidence

I had a discussion many years ago with a Jesuit priest on the subject of faith. He asked me, "But don't you make acts of faith every day? Isn't going to the bus stop and expecting the bus to arrive on time an act of faith?"

I thought about his question and answered, "No, it's more a sense of confidence based on past experience. I feel fairly sure the bus will arrive on time because in the year I've been catching it each morning, it's only been late once. And that was during a snowstorm." I added, "If it were an act of faith then past experience would play very little part in it. For example, the Church seems to expect people to maintain faith under any circumstances, even when their prayers go unanswered in the most difficult and worthy of situations."

He could answer this only by saying "God is always testing our faith. If it were his wish to answer our prayers, he would do so. If he doesn't it may mean He is putting our faith to the test."
"So God does not want believers to have confidence in Him. Is that the idea?" I asked. "I served five years in the Navy, and one of the most important things to me, especially as a fighter pilot, was to have a high degree of confidence in my leaders. There wasn't really any room for faith."  We ended the discussion as I expected we would -- agreeing to disagree.

I had an incident during my flying training where I allowed the aircraft to get much too low during a practice dive bombing run before starting to pull out of the dive. While I felt sure I had left it too late, my training took over, and I pulled back on the control column as hard as I possibly could, hoping the aircraft would neither disintegrate nor stall.

It actually crossed my mind to pray, but quickly decided I this would not alter the outcome. I was blacking out from the G force, but I knew for certain that the only thing that could possibly save me was to hold the pressure on the control column. This gave new meaning to the phrase "hold on for dear life"!
When my vision cleared, the aircraft had leveled off at about fifty feet above the ground and was rushing directly at a farmhouse set in a small cluster of trees. I pulled up, more gently this time, afraid the aircraft might disintegrate, and cleared the farmhouse. Trembling and sweating, and cursing myself for my stupidity, but eternally grateful to be alive, I flew back to the airfield and made a shaky but safe landing.
My self-confidence was somewhat damaged by this experience -- we were always taught lo learn from the mistakes of others since you might not survive your own. The thoughts that come to you after surviving what seemed at the time like certain death are very sobering ones.  "You're not such a hotshot fighter pilot as you think.  Are you?"  "By now, you could just be nother name in an accident report."  "You could have killed anyone in that farmhouse." 
At the same time, my confidence in the aircraft was greatly increased. I had pushed it beyond what I understood to be its limits -- I had exceeded the maximimum recommended speed by nearly 100 mph -- but it (and I) had survived. Simple, uninformed faith, would not have helped much in this situation, and I cannot believe it would have made me a better pilot.

The End of the Christian Era?

The April 13 2009 issue of Newsweek carries an article by Jon Meacham entitled "The End of Christian America", pointing out that "the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades.".

The article includes a quotation by R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, described by Meacham as "a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life ..." —as follows. "The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture."

Mohler's statement makes the false assumption, one readily espoused by evangelicals and others, that this country was founded as a Christain nation when, in fact, the founding fathers went to great lengths to ensure that this would not be the case. The assumption, however, is readily used by the religious right as a justification for weakening the separation between Church and State, to whit, their stance on abortion and same-sex marriage, and imposing their views on all Americans.

Concerning the inerrancy of the Bible, a pillar of conservative religious teaching, I have always viewed this as a survival strategy for the fundamentalist ministry. One of the delights of the Bible is its wealth of contradictions, allusions, mixed messages and (from the perspective of one with at least the rudiments of a scientific/humanist education) its risible improbabilities. An educated person, regardless of his/her religious beliefs, can read the Bible with both pleasure and inspiration, and draw from it what conclusions he/she may.

However, religious fundamentalism is premised on the notion that only those trained in the ministry are qualified to correctly interpret the Bible (as though such a thing were ever possible). That this has become a highly lucrative occupation is evident to anyone who watches Sunday morning TV, or follows the exploits of the Jim Bakkers and other scalawags of their ilk.