If faith is a gift why is it so hard to give away?
Have you concluded for sure that it is yours to give???
Or is it a gift from God not actually given to some?
Does this question have valid semantic content?
Does everyone have this gift or no? What does this gift comprise of to those who are not Christian? What does it mean?
Faith, a I understand its use here, is a subset of the innate necessity and “hard wiring” of humans having to with believing. Each human is born into circumstances not in their control. Some are born in an igloo, a palace, a grass hut, a wigwam, a yurt, something made of mud or bricks, a hut, a shanty, or a home that some few of us think of as a home. Believing is a necessity of survival in any of those circumstances. The contents of that belief are peculiar to the time and tone of that culture, general and familial, and its conditions. “Faith” is a subset of the propensity to and necessity of believing. What one believes, as is easy to figure out, is what one grows up with, as modified by experience and interest.
Must it be supernaturally infused into a individual?
Some people have spiritual experiences, or, more often, emotional experience they mistake for spiritual. Most often, due to lack of due diligence the default position is to explain those in terms of one’s faith. Ask any Shintoist, Chritafarian, Baha’i, cargo cultist, shaman follower, Christian, beleiver i luck, Jew, Muslim, or whatever. If something “spiritual” happens to them, it happens as interpreted through their lens of belief.
What does faith mean to one who doesn’t have faith in the supernatural? Is it a lack of something others have more of?
Some people have spiritual experiences, or emotional experience they mistake for spiritual. Most often, due to lack of due diligence the default position is to explain those in terms of one’s faith. Ask any Shintoist, Chritafarian, Baha’i, cargo cultist, shaman follower, Christian, beleiver i luck, Jew, Muslim, or whatever. If something “spiritual” happens to them, it happens as interpreted through their lens of belief.
What is baffling is that in the face of the clear evidence that not two people believe exactly the same thing for the same reason, why is the hard work of doing a thorough self inquiry and assessment of one’self
as a phenomenon so rarely done? I think often it is because the very belief system, whatever it may be, including political, emotional ans social, the very belief system itself acts as a barrier to self examination in terms of a wider or Universal reality. And because that belief system is there originally as a
survival mechanism, all of the pre-verbal and pre cognitive injunctions, about the last thing anyone will do is voluntarily subject it to dispassionate scrutiny analysis. This is why so many have said, from experience,
“The search for Reality is the most dangerous undertaking; it will destroy your world.”
Why is that said? It is very simple. The world as each of us perceives it is primarily a construct which has enough symbolic correlation with Reality to allow us to function, despite errors in judgement and perception of astonishing magnitude. It takes a remarkable personal strength and integrity to embark on an inner journey of actual self observation and deal with the consequences of that. Or it takes a shock so significant that one must conclude that they are either no longer in Kansas, or that the looking glass is one freaky adventure. But beyond those is some much greater semblance of Reality, as at least the initial barriers of preconception fall away. How many even ever experientially realize that that their entire world view is heavily, if not completely, influenced by preconceptions that are completely circumstantial? What a gift to see past even some of these!
So for may part, a way more important set of questions is about how to get beyond belief and faith, other than as an initial survival necessity. And how does that bear on religion, especially those on here who might surely react to this view? I submit that in the same way as political views are passed down, so are religious ones. Does this invalidate the religious beliefs? In the sense that they might be rote, yes. In the sense that they might have an ultimate symbolic referent that might be arrived at? Not necessarily. But as Nicoll points out there are a minimum of three levels to the interpretation of the miracles and parables of the Christ. And that idea might be very much more widely distributed over other scriptures and faiths with more useful results than expected.
