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Earned Faith vs. Blind Faith
In Doubt we Trust
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One person cannot know everything. There is far too much information in the Tree of Knowledge to keep in our own brains, and there are far too many things we just don't know. We therefore have to trust other people. and make working assumptions about the world we see around us.
In the Church of Reality, faith is not blind, but earned. We question everything. We embrace doubt in both the giving of doubt and the receiving of doubt. By embracing doubt and scrutiny, we work to earn trust, to be credible, to be accountable, to have a process that has integrity, and to be responsible for what we believe in. For us to be trusted, we have to earn that trust.
Why do I believe in Evolution? After all, I'm not billions of years old. I haven't examined any fossils. I haven't compared any DNA. In fact - I personally don't know that DNA really exists. I am relying on the word of others, people who I do trust, people who I have faith in, people who have earned my faith. I believe in evolution because it comes from trusted sources.
But what if evolution is wrong? What if space aliens constructed this planet yesterday and created us with false memories of the past and fake fossil evidence to make us believe that we have a historical past? What if the Earth really is only 24 hours old? Or that this reality is just a giant computer simulation in a higher level of reality. Those are possibilities that we can't prove are not so. After all, if we're just characters in some great video game, we would never know it.
Most everything we know comes from other people who we trust. We just don't have the resources to test everything ourselves.
Is reality really real? Is this a simulation? Am I the only person in the universe that is real and this is all my personal dream? I don't know. So what am I to do? I suppose that I am going to just have to pick one and go with it. So I'm going to put my faith in reality. And if we are a computer generated simulation, then it is still the correct decision because the programmers want us to believe in the artificial reality. So one might say that Realists have chosen to put their faith in reality.
What is knowledge and where does it come from? How do we know what we know? There are things we know directly, from our own experiences, and things we know based on trust. Even what we know directly is suspect because we know it through our flawed senses and we understand it with our flawed brains. And everything that we do know is relative or related to everything else that we know.
Imagine what it must be like to be a newborn baby. You open your eyes and begin to see things for the first time. But what do you see? You see walls, lights, chairs, a bed, people, mommy, but these are all just images. The information goes in but it doesn't mean anything because a newborn's brain doesn't have very much knowledge to relate this information to. Everything is new. Reality itself is new. Learning begins a little bit at a time and builds up by relating new information to everything else you know. Over time you learn language and associate objects and concept with words and phrases and talking increases the ability to communicate and get information from others so that the young mind becomes connected to the Tree of Knowledge. Most everything we know is something that we learned from other people and what they know comes from common knowledge that is trusted to be true.
Of course the problem is that not everything that you are taught is true. We all know that we were filled with a certain amount of misinformation and now we have to go back and reexamine what we were taught to see if it's really true. But we can't reexamine everything. We are stuck with having to know things based on trust. We can only hope that what we trust is correct. |
Since we don't have the resources to test everything ourselves and the vast majority of what we believe in comes from trusting other sources, how do we know who to trust? If we are Realists and committed to reality the way it really is, then who do we trust to get our real information from? Who do Realist have faith in?
I know that several of you readers are cringing at this moment. "How dare you use reality and faith in the same sentence! That is Blasphemy" Brothers and Sisters - I feel your pain.
The quest for truth is an interesting path indeed. You decide to become a Realist. So - what do you do next? Do you go to the Book of Reality, the ultimate authority on everything and start studying? Oh, if only such a book existed it would be so much easier. But unfortunately such a reference book doesn't exist. All we have is a Tree of Knowledge that contains a lot of bullshit that we have to sort through and try to figure out as best we can what is and isn't real. And all we have to work with is our biological brains, a very crude tool indeed, and whatever computers we can build to enhance our brains and store and communicate what we know. It's not much to work with - but it's all we have so we are going to have to do the best we can with what we have.
The question isn't so much a matter of who we trust, but why we trust them. It's about the reputation of the source. Is this information coming from a trusted source? What makes a trusted source trusted?
In the Church of Reality we believe trust has to be earned. To be trusted you have to be trustworthy, or worthy of trust. You get to be trustworthy by being responsible, by being dependable, and by being accountable. Everyone makes mistakes. Even the most trusted sources get it wrong sometimes. But making a mistake doesn't mean that you aren't trustworthy. It just means that you aren't perfect. We in the Church of Reality know that what we know is a small subset of what we can know and that we aren't perfect and a lot of what we know is just plain wrong. However, there is a difference between a trustworthy source getting it wrong and an untrustworthy source getting it wrong. When the trusted source gets it wrong and they find out they are wrong, they fix it. They admit they were wrong and they change to what is right. Often they even investigate the mistake to see why the mistake was made and what they can do to prevent mistakes from happening in the future. They investigate to see if there are any more mistakes that might be related. Untrustworthy sources in contrast maintain the wrong information in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
You become trustworthy by accepting scrutiny and doubt and fixing mistakes when you are wrong. In this way you earn the faith of others.
To be worthy of earned faith you first have to have a commitment to the truth. You have to be committed to reality as it really is. To be trustworthy you have to be a realist. In addition to being committed to reality, you have to be open to doubt and scrutiny. To a person who is trustworthy, doubt and scrutiny are helpful for finding errors and correcting mistakes. Thus when the trusted person gets it wrong, then other people can point out the error so it can be fixed. A person of earned faith would respond, "Oh thank you for finding my mistake, I'll fix it right away!" Doubt and scrutiny are really volunteer help. They are free assistance from a community of people who are interested in your work. A trustworthy person is thankful that other people have shown enough interest to take the time to think about their work and care enough about it that they invest the effort to help correct errors.
Earned faith comes from doubt based faith. In the Church of Reality, our faith is rooted in our doubt process. We come together as a doubt based community to assist each other in our quest for reality by scrutinizing our sources so that they can rise to the level of earned faith. |
Blind faith is putting your trust in the untrustworthy. Blind faith is accepting or believing without question. Blind faith often involves believing in spite of the evidence. Everyone sort of knows what blind faith means. Blind faith is what all other religions believe in except your religion. You are one of the lucky ones who knows the truth and everyone who doesn't agree with you must be the victim of blind faith. But how do you know that one of them isn't right and you are the one who is blindly believing someone's bullshit?
Blind faith has some objective properties that can be tested to determine if the faith is in fact blind faith. This test doesn't determine if what you believe in is true or not. People who have earned faith often make mistakes. And, as the old saying goes, "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day." having said that, a trustworthy source is more likely to be right than an untrustworthy source. Thus from the point of view of a Realist, an earned faith source is a better bet for accurate information than a blind faith source.
So - what are the objective qualities of blind faith? Blind faith requires that you believe without evidence or proof. Sometimes blind faith requires that you believe in spite of the evidence. One of the properties of blind faith is that doubt and scrutiny are actually prohibited. The more strongly that doubt is prohibited, the more blind is the faith.
For example, many religions require you to believe in God. This is something that cannot be questioned. You must believe without any evidence that God exists. To question the existence of God is a sin and it is punishable by death. And death isn't the end of the punishment, it's just the beginning. You are condemned to fry in Hell forever. You are required to suspend all logic and reason in order to believe in God. In fact it is only by "faith" that you achieve salvation and eternal life in paradise. In this context, if you had "proof", then you wouldn't be believing in God on faith, which is why God allows Satan to create facts that point to God not existing so as to fool the non-believers.
Blind Faith prohibits proof, scrutiny, doubt, evidence, verification, or any process of accountability, making the correction of errors nearly impossible.
Without going into the issue of whether God exists or not, it is clear that the rules that require the belief in God are blind faith. Religion declares God to be outside of any type of doubt, scrutiny, or accountability. It is in the realm of the unquestionable. It has to be accepted without any sort of fact checking. And there is no method of correcting mistakes.
Anything that can not be questioned is assumed to be untrustworthy.
If information is placed in a classification where it is beyond question and scrutiny, then, as far as the Church of Reality is concerned, it is presumed to be untrue. We in the Church of Reality accept on "faith" that anything that is true should stand up to doubt. In fact the process of standing up to scrutiny is what makes what is true more credible. So if something is really real then why should debate be prohibited? Is your God so weak that his existence cannot be questioned? The official position of the Church of Reality is that anything than cannot be questioned is bullshit. If doubt is prohibited, then they are admitting that their claim can not stand the test of scrutiny. |
The Church of Reality relies on doubt to strengthen our faith. What this means is our earned faith. How do we know this is a real religion and not just the rantings of one person? How do we know if we are on the right path? People often ask the question, "Won't the Church of Reality degenerate over time just like all the other religions have? What is different about this church from all other churches?"
What gives the Church of Reality the strength to stay on course is that we embrace doubt and scrutiny. Questioning everything that we stand for is mandated. Blind faith is prohibited. If this religion ever stoops to blind faith then it can be assumed that is has degenerated and must be abandoned. It is through doubt that we earn the faith of our members. We are trusted only to the extent that we are trustworthy. Yes - this church will make mistakes, but we will fix those mistakes as they are discovered. We will remain faithful to our commitment to reality the way it really is.
Knowledge must always be under review not only for mistakes, but for a deeper understanding of what we know. For example, 200 years ago we knew what gravity was. But today we know what gravity is on a whole new level. In 200 more years gravity will mean much more than it does today. This is also true for the Sacred Principles of the Church of Reality. What we have written is merely the first draft of the Sacred Principles. It is a starting place for them from where to evolve forward. I believe that the Sacred Principles are a sound start in the birth of this new religion. But I would think that they are at best grossly incomplete and that in the future that we will have better sacred principles that are far beyond where we are today. |
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Newsflash |
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The IRS has approved the 501(C)3 tax exempt status of the Church of Reality. |
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"RealityŽ" and "Church of RealityŽ" are registered trademarks of the Church of Reality.
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