Faith and War
This essay, on the power of faith in waging war is extremely provocative. Here is the final sentence:
That is the weakness of reason, Winston Smith’s weakness: to stop when there is no reason to continue. And that is the power of faith: to go on without the answers, but to go on.
On of the criticisms of ‘faith’, typically applied to religion but I thinik also approriate to other sufficiently motivating belief systems, is that it causes a lot of wars. I have my doubts about this, I think wars are almost always caused by far more mundane factors, but it is obvious that faith is used to prosecute wars.
Faith is useful, perhaps even necessary in fighting a war. Some would say that this automatically makes faith bad or evil. I am not sure about that. Faith is a motivating power, and like any power can be used for a variety of purposes. Even when it motivates us to fight it doesn’t seem apparent to me that that is automatically wrong.
The question the essay raises, and I think it is a valid one, is does the west have anything to believe in that can counter the belief of the Islamist Jihadis. I think that there are plenty of things we have that deserve that kind of faith, but I am not sure how many of us, myself included, have much faith in them.
Faith is scary. For people to go on without answers is scary. Take for example the monkeys who beat a monkey on faith. There was this expirement where they put a bunch on monkeys in a room. They put food on a platform above the monkeys. When ever a monkey tried to climb up to the platform they simulated rain. Thus, when ever a monkey climbed the platform at all the other monkies beat it up. Then, they started replacing monkies. The new monkey would always try and get the food. The other monkies would beat it up. They continued to replace the monkies until all the monkies from the rain-group were replaced. There were no monkies left that knew why they were beating up the “new” monkey that was trying to get the food. And yet they did. That to me is faith. Granted they are monkies and we are human, we should be smarter than this. But, they, without question, continued to beat the “net” monkies. That to me is why faith is scary.