Faith for atheists. Part 5

Faith for atheists

Part 5: Faith brings fulfilment!

Why would anyone reject a source of happiness on a doctrinaire basis of, “I don’t believe in that”? Yet this is the position atheists have got themselves into. By rejecting an inadequate notion of God (the discredited one that rests on the idea of a deal) atheists think they have “settled all that religious nonsense” and so are free to live life totally unencumbered by religion. In doing so, they give up their opportunity to live up to their potential – a potential that is not, in this sense, a matter of belief, but is simply a matter of using the human faculties that we have.

There is still a huge amount of faith needed to live this newly defined life of faith, in that it requires an immense personal commitment to live in a certain way and to adopt a particular way of looking at life. However, it is not “faith” in the sense of, “If I believe this hard enough it will come true”; it’s the faith of, for example, an athlete who believes that if she trains hard she can become better at her sport. She can, of course, decide not to train. She can make a “faith decision” that she’s not really bothered that much to put in the effort that’s needed. She might doubt that she can improve enough or that becoming a better athlete is really worth it. She might get distracted by other things that strike her as more attractive. And, of course, no-one has to become an athlete. But with the religious quest, we are claiming that it is the ultimate experience, and we were using the example of an athlete as someone who had set her heart on becoming the best athlete that she had within her. The example is to show that, in this redefined religious quest the attitude of faith is as important as ever, but we can see now that faith is definitely not wishful thinking that contradicts the known facts of the universe; it is now a faith commitment to achieve the good goals of your faith in a way that is entirely consistent with how we know the universe to operate. Huge numbers of people have given up on faith in God because “the deal” which they had hoped to make was shown to be hollow, but here we have an understanding of faith whereby the benefits of faith will certainly come to you with spiritual practice, as surely as an athlete’s muscles become stronger with exercise.

We close, not simply with the testimony of all the great religious and spiritual leaders through the ages, but, even more importantly, with the testimony of countless “ordinary” people whose lives are evidence that they gave themselves to a way of life that connected them to an experience of transcendent bliss, which overflowed into altruistic and often sacrificial loving service, and in this way they considered themselves to have found complete fulfilment.