What say you, Interwebs?

[clarentine]

Posit: faith is submission.

Discuss.

(Yes, this is pertinent, and I do want others' opinions on the subject, preferably those of people who consider themselves to have religious faith.)

Comments

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Faith is not reasonable, since it contains - by its nature - a prerational component. (There is nothing wrong with this. I am using 'prerational' purely in a descriptive sense.)

Therefore, in my experience, where there is a hierarchy with exclusive - or semi-exclusive - claims upon the divine, people are lead to equate faith in the deity with faith in the hierarchy, and therefore submission to their way of doing things.

Faith requires the submission of the rational intellect to the prerational experience. (I don't think I'm wrong to make a distinction between intellect and experience/sensation: I've had religious experiences, but applying what I know about the untrustworthiness of my brain, why should I I trust it when it tells me I'm experiencing a deep connection with the universe anymore than when it's telling me you suck and no one will ever love you?) I do think this is a telling point, because - while not in itself being anything more than an individual choice - it provides a map of world-experience onto which other forms of submission can be overlaid.

Faith in both Christianity and Islam is also equated to submission to the will of god. How one conceives of the will of god is of course different depending on what flavour of believer one is, but I don't think anyone's denying that there's a certain amount of submitting supposed to be going on. (c.f. Paul, with his comparison of the church and the - 1st century CE - family, where god is clearly in the position of pater familias.)

There are different kinds of submission, but I think faith boths requires (a certain kind of) submission and leads to (other kinds of) submission.

It's the prerational component at work. Once you start accepting things on faith, at what point do you reasonably stop?

On the other hand, belief, piety and ritual in non-monotheistic traditions works a little differently.

Especially beings with obscene amounts of power who misuse it, eh?

Word. If I were still a religious person, I'd be a hell of a lot more bitter than I am now.