A belief can change in the light of new information or changing priorities and can be quite enculturated. In contrast to this, my Catholic faith, which is of course a gift from God, is not subject to personal whim.
You make an excellent point. I have felt this way myself many times when people ask the dreaded question: “Do you believe in God?” Nowadays I tend to answer something like “Yes, but not in the sense that you understand that term.” Or, similarly, I sometimes go for: “I don’t
believe in God as
you use the term ‘believe’. Rather, I
know my connection to God, which is a certainty, and I act out of that certainty.” In any case, I provide an answer that prevents the inquirer from projecting their assumptions about what belief is, onto me. This tends to ruffle a few feathers, but I can live with that. I’d rather endure the consequences of being “unpleasant” or “difficult” than accomodate a conversation in which my faith is made a topic of discussion as if it was something arbitrary that I baselessly put my confidence in. As I see it, I’m doing the enquirer (typically a non-believer) a favor by confronting him with his greatest misunderstanding, which is that he (the unbeliever) knows what faith is, and that it is something that he, in his knowledge, has rejected it while I have accepted it. The truth is that he does not know what faith is, because whoever knows it
cannot reject it.
They think that I have a right to my faith but that it is personal to me and is not any more valid than anyone else’s ideas. All churches are equal etc. I am perhaps playing with words but I want to get the message across to them that Christianity is not just a whim or a personal comfort zone. It’s real. I don’t want to legitimize their attitude by just saying this is my belief.
Precisely. I couldn’t have said it better. The authentic believer pretty much has a
duty to refrain from legitimizing the view that belief is an arbitrary choice, and a duty, when put on the spot, to actively object to it. To go along with the “arbitrarization” of one’s belief is not only insincere, but actually harmful to one’s own faith, because you’re adopting (if only for the purpose and duration of the conversation) the other’s hugely fallacious view of faith. As I said, I’d rather endure unpleasantness in a conversation than submit to the implicit debasement of faith in a “reasonable talk”.
P.S. In addition it is quite problematic that the inquiring person typically believes quite firmly that by allowing you your “beliefs” they have been sufficiently “nice” to be entitled thereafter to a certain amount of skepticism (implicit or explicit), even if you (as the believer) had given no indication to be interested in a conversation of that sort. I call this the “tyranny of civility”, which basically means: “If I’ve been civilized to you, I have the right to subject your views to my skepticism, and you must bear and engage that with reciprocal civility.” I personally refuse to subject to this subtle tyranny, which tends to surprise people.
