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.
I have new book coming about living well in a broken culture
Shock of seeing ‘Airplane!’ was realizing that I wasn’t all alone
When we feel we’ve lost control, our behavior stops making sense
In bad times, human nature starts looking for some new scapegoats
To escape hate, turn off media and deal with others in love, kindness
Flawed bricks can build our lives, because perfection never arrives
‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’
A haunting question: ‘Where is love now, out here in the dark?’
As our heroes grow old and die, it’s a reminder of our mortality