30 Aug 2007
Mother Teresa's Struggle

I've commented on Mother Teresa before, expressing outrage and disbelief that such a person could actually be considered for any sort of "sainthood". But this latest revelation about her "spiritual struggle" has actually caused me to revise my opinion of her somewhat: she wasn't merely evil, she was monumentally stupid as well, and ignored the lack of evidence apparent in her own life for her religious convictions.

I'm not trying to be cute or trite here: this is a real point of theological divergence between monotheisms, which are based on faith in revelations, and heathen religions, which are based on experience in the world. If I stopped feeling the presence of a god, or if heathenry stopped "working" for me, I'd find another deity or another way of working on the double.

The author of this article takes Christopher Hitchens, an atheist, to task for "trivializing the experience of faith beyond all recognition". I would suggest that he's right: Hitchens does indeed trivialize faith, because the experience of faith is in fact trivial, and dangerous to boot!

If faith is "the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen...", then I have none. In fact, that whole statement is an oxymoron. Evidence is that which can be sensed: seen, touched, smelt, felt or tasted. Hope is purely a construct of the sentient mind - it has no substance at all.

In reality, faith works out to little more than zealous loyalty and blind trust. "Trust me - I know what's best!" "You've stuck with me this far -- have a little faith, you know I'm on your side!"

Faith leads to things like the Inquisition, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Perhaps more topically, it leads to equivocations like "I know there weren't really any WMD's in Iraq, but that doesn't matter! Bush was right to go in there and clean Saddam's clock, because he's our President and I'm a loyal American!".

There is no concept of "faith" in heathenry. I expect that if I do certain things and behave in certain ways, results will follow. I don't know what the results will be: expectation is not the same as faith, because expectations may fail, and are recognized as having that potential from the get-go. If my expectations fail, I change my practice, attempting to get results.

If monotheists are the idealists of the religious world, we heathens are the pragmatists. And I've never really understood idealism at all...

Admiration for a woman who accomplished great things in the face of spiritual despair.

(link) [U.S. News & World Report]

07:01 /Asatru | 5 comments | permanent link