As a Pagan and, even more specifically, as a Pagan who works most closely with Athena and Apollo, I find the reduction of religion to “faith” as deeply problematic. For example, we have inter”faith” gatherings and organizations. When I attend, well-meaning people ask me what my “faith” is and tell me it is clear that I am a person of “faith.”
Actually, I’m really not. I am a deeply religious person, but I don’t even like faith. I am a person of practice and of experience and of the quest for experiential knowledge. I may not be able to transfer that knowledge to another person any more than the man who broke his bonds and saw the Light outside of Plato’s cave could convey it to others, but still, my beliefs are rooted in my experiences, not in faith. To me, the call for faith seems to be a demand that we unquestioningly accept the conclusions that an authority (human or other) has told us are true. I’m not down with that agenda. It would actually be against what I have concluded the Divine beings I work with want, based on working to understand their natures, characters, and agendas.
That doesn’t mean at all that I am dismissing the great leaders of religion or that what people are told is in their holy books is wrong. It could absolutely be correct. However, I look at all the great religious teachers as calling us to various paths to walk as experiments where we will confirm or deny that they lead where we think they are supposed to go. It doesn’t become knowledge until it is experienced, until that point, it is a hypothesis. Faith asks you to accept as fact a hypothesis that has not been validated by experience and stop the investigation.
After trying to untangle and analyze what I was thinking and feeling about faith, I began asking myself if it ever has an appropriate role. I decided that it probably does, but it should be severely limited. My conclusion was that faith is appropriate when a belief, whether it is a lie or not, is necessary. The example I came up with for myself is that I have faith that even if it is excruciatingly painful, I am capable of handling whatever change comes my way. I have no way of knowing if that is true or not because I cannot see all possible changes, but that belief is necessary for me to handle change. Therefore, the conclusion is predicated on my ability to hold the belief as true first.
After I realized this, I began to wonder if this is what people, especially many Christians, really mean by faith. I can’t tell because they use the word in such generalized ways. Now I would like to get into a deeper conversation with some of them.
Musings of an Occult Librarian 