No matter what it is you believe in, some form of faith is at the root

By David McElroy · April 8, 2012

For hundreds of millions of Christians around the world, today is Easter. It’s a day when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, which is central to the Christian faith. For many other people, it’s just a time to feel superior to religious people — on the assumption that religious people live by faith and the atheist world lives by “reality.” I’d like to suggest that faith is at the root of what everyone believes.

Faith means having a belief in something that you can’t prove with certainty. There’s no question that much of religious belief is completely based on faith. But what about the rest of life? What about all the other things that you accept as true, but which you couldn’t prove if your life depended on it?

On a mundane level, you have faith in a lot of things that you can’t prove. Have you been to Moscow? Or to the North Pole? Or to Cairo? Most of us haven’t been to those places, yet we believe in them, because we’ve seen pictures and read stories and heard experiences from other. We believe the evidence is strong that they exist, enough so that we wouldn’t question their existence.

You believe in atoms and various sub-atomic particles, even if you don’t have a clue what they really are. You can’t see them. You don’t really understand them. But you were taught in science class that they were the building blocks of all matter, so you believe. Can you prove it? No, you can’t. You just have faith that the people who should know something about this really do.

You can’t even prove that the world around you exists. You believe you’re reading an article on a computer or phone right now. You believe that there’s a world of billions of other people with their own individual lives. You believe you live on a complex ecosystem called Earth. You believe those things because you see them and hear them. You believe your senses. But how do you know your senses are real? How do you know that anything exists? How do you know that this world isn’t just an illusion created inside your own mind? How do you know that you’re not the only consciousness that exists — and you’ve made up everything else?

In all of these cases, you can’t prove anything other than your own consciousness, but you accept various things I’ve listed here as fact. Why? Because the evidence is strong enough, in your judgement. Or you’ve experienced enough of something for it to seem reasonable to accept your experiences as real. Whether you like it or not, those things you are accepting as true are the things you accept on faith.

We can — and do — disagree about what’s reasonable to have faith in. For example, I don’t find what Muslims believe credible. I don’t find what Hindus believe believable. And I don’t find what Mormons believe to be reasonable. In the same way, those groups don’t accept my faith in the central points of Christian salvation. And those who are atheists or agnostics don’t accept what any of us believe. To them, we’re all crazy to accept any of it.

So we can expect to disagree about what to have faith in. Your faith might be in the supremacy of science or the logic of your particular brand of philosophy. But just because you have an internally consistent system, that doesn’t mean it’s proven. It merely means that you’ve built a logical house on a foundation of assumptions. The assumptions that lie at the root of your system are the things you have faith in.

For me, I’ve experienced what I believe to be God’s presence. I can’t prove it to you. I don’t even have any desire to prove it. The only thing I want to do is to tell you what I believe and what I’ve experienced — in the best way I can communicate it. I can bear witness to what I’ve experienced. I can tell you what I believe in my heart to be true. But I can’t prove it. I believe that only God gives faith. I also believe that if I hadn’t experienced God and hadn’t been given this faith, I’d be right there with you making fun of it.

I don’t really see any reason for atheists and Christians to be in conflict. I don’t see why we can’t agree to disagree. Non-believers haven’t experienced something that I know is real, so it seems very reasonable to me that they don’t believe. I’d like them to experience what I have, but that only happens through faith — and I can’t give that to anyone.

We all have our faith in something. For some, their faith might be in UFOs. For others, their faith is in chemtrails or Bigfoot. For others, their faith is in biochemistry or the writings of Ayn Rand. For me, I know what I have my faith in. The God I know is much more personal and real to me than your philosophy is to you.

We differ radically in what we believe in, but it’s very clear that we all have faith in something.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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