Faith of Our Fathers......

a short commentary by Justin Other Smith
(maybe a little on the heavy side)

As a young man, I was taught that faith can move mountains, and over the years I’ve learned that faith, plus the indomitable human spirit and a few tricks of technology really can work miracles. We can move mountains. And conquer the oceans and fly a space ship to the moon and beyond.
But in the process of expanding boundaries, technology has also created greater barriers than any mountain or sea. The gulf between the haves and the have-nots is greater than the Great Wall of China, wider than the widest ocean, higher than the highest mountain, more difficult to bridge than outer space.
While the world hasn’t actually grown smaller, technology has made it seem so. From our living rooms, we can see starvation in Africa, floods in China, earthquakes in the Mideast and war and murder in every corner of the world. From the rain-forests of the equator to the frozen poles, we are witness to places and people on an unprecedented scale in human history.
The technology that has given man the power to create miracles has given rise to a new faith in self. Cast in God’s image, we have become Godlike, assuming dominion not only over all the fish and fowl and beasts of the earth but over nature as well, bent on tweaking God’s handiwork, creating an even more perfect Eden.
The winds of change are blowing in a new world order and the unknown both titillates and frightens us. Human life is a paradox. We search always for new ideas, new ways of doing things. We seek to explore the unknown in this world and others. Yet, the more things change, the more we want them to stay the same. “Better the devil that we know,” we say, as we hold on to the familiar with all our might.
We are curious about other peoples and cultures, intrigued with the exotic, the fascinating sights, sounds, and scents of all those faraway places. But we seem to prefer them as tourist attractions. In living technicolor, as it were. And of course, all those peoples and cultures are just as curious as we. And just as standoffish.
In the beginning, we are told, there was a void and God created the heavens and the earth and humanity or vice versa. Perhaps that’s why we keep asking which came first, the chicken or the egg.
Whether you believe the children's version of Creation or the adult tale of Evolution doesn’t matter. When Adam was created out of the primordial ooze, God was there. He’s always been there, always been the hope of mankind. But, we’re taught to be suspicious of things that come too easily. If it seems to good to be true, then it must be false. Nothing good comes without a price. All our belief systems tell us that salvation must have a higher price than simply believing. Caveat Emptor and all that.
And so wary mankind invented religion. Or should I say, religions, because, amoeba-like, once religion came to be, it began to split and multiply. A multitude of religions. A veritable plethora of Gods. A ritualized system of sacrifice and reward leading humanity down the garden path to salvation. And every religion believed that their path was the right path. The “My God is bigger than your God” path.
And they all set out to prove that theirs was the true path to God and Salvation. And the good life here on earth. Like the farmer who doesn’t want to own all the land in the world, just that which borders his property, so the missionaries fanned out around the world, sword and shield, fire and brimstone, saving souls, no matter how many died in the process. Jihad, Intifada, Crusade, Inquisition. Repent and be saved! Convert and live! Accept on faith the holy word of God! Or else!
Except, according to the scriptures, God has given us free will and free will has given us doubt. Doubt has given us religion and every religion has a holy book that contain the scriptures that are the inspired words of God, and which provides us with a road map, the one true path to salvation. And we’re told that the book and the map have been provided by God and we should accept on faith everything contained therein. Methuselah lived 900 years. Jonah was swallowed by a great fish. And regurgitated to tell about it. So was Pinocchio, but that’s another story. It’s nice to have all the answers. Rather like the lawyer who doesn’t need to know the difference between right and wrong so long as he knows which book to look in to find a precedent to support his allegation of the moment. If we believe, the way is clear. Faith is the answer to every question.
The teaching of faith as the means of getting to salvation is common to almost every religion. The road to Heaven is an obscure and rocky path full of obstacles and the way is clear if only you have faith. Faith is the beacon that lights the way, that eliminates the potholes and dead ends and turns the path into a superhighway that runs straight and true.
And if you drive a horse that is easily distracted by events around him, you simply attach blinders to the harness so that only the forward view is unimpeded and the horse will then plod forward undistracted. Religion is often the blinder for humans allowing for an undistracted route to the promised land.
We can worship at the altar of our desire, be it Muslim, Christian, Hindi, Buddhist, or Wicca. We may be Atheist, Agnostic, or Animist. Or whatever else we’ve been able to come up with in our benighted past or what might develop in the future. We have only to believe in what we’ve been taught. And, as we believe, so shall it be.
Assuming, of course, that our particular religion is the only path to salvation and all the other religions are misguided and their practitioners have chosen the wrong road, the road to perdition. And of course, it’s our duty, our sacred cause, to show them the error of their ways and point the unbelievers, the misguided, on the one true path to everlasting salvation. Even at the point of a sword. Or, an atomic warhead.
Which, of course, leads to a quandary for the simple reason that every religion of humankind assumes that they are the one and only highway to Heaven and that all around the world, every culture has their own holy book, the inspired words of ......

God or Allah or Manitou.
Henry, Hank, or maybe Sue.
In a pinch, I suppose,
Just about any old name’ll do.

The eminently quotable Wm. Shakespeare said,“A rose by any name would smell as sweet.” We have free will, and If we want to suffer for our faith, that’s all right with God. And if it’s okay with God, it should be okay for all of us.
But....., since we’re all different people with different languages, it only stands to reason that we all have different names for God. How do we know who is right and who is wrong? Or are they all the same, a rose by any name? Who gets to go to Heaven and who has to go to Hell? Do all roads lead to Rome? Do all dogs go to Heaven?
Or is Heaven exclusionary? Well, of course it is. At least, that’s what every major religion in the world teaches. That only good people get to go to Heaven while bad people have to go to Hell. Santa Claus knows who’s naughty or nice but the rest of us seem to be pretty confused. The Christian Bible says, “Judge not, lest thou be judged” but the Christian leadership seems very judgmental. So too, does Islam and Judaism, and probably all the other religions also.
Makes you wonder, is there a Christian Heaven, a Jewish Heaven, a Muslim Heaven? How about a Heathen Heaven? Does God exclude all those people that seem never to have heard of Him? Or are they considered among the ‘innocents’ who have a free pass?
Since the Jews are considered God’s Chosen People, where do they go? A good friend of mine, a sometime, part-time preacher of the Christian gospel assures me in all sincerity that God has reserved a place for His Chosen People. Is Heaven ghettoized, segregated? Where do you put the Brit’s as opposed to, well, almost everyone else?
These may seem to be trivial questions to those whose faith is super-strong, to those who live a life without doubt, but what about the doubting Thomas’ among us, the millions, perhaps billions of people who are riddled with doubt about almost everything from belief in an unseen deity to whether organic food is really and truly organic or just a marketing ploy?
And what about the great archaeology find purporting to be the coffin of Jesus’ brother, James, offered up as proof of the existence of Jesus?
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never doubted the existence of Jesus. Call it the brainwashing experience of modern education or whatever, but I believe that a man called Jesus walked the earth. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that Jews and Moslems also believe that was true. I don’t think whether or not Jesus lived was ever a question.
The divinity of Jesus, however, has been questioned since he prowled the landscape of Judea claiming to be the son of God. But since Jesus supposedly spoke in parables a good bit of the time, was he saying that he, alone, was the son of God or that we are all the children of God?
Was he perhaps speaking of a brotherhood of humanity; that the Colonel’s lady and Rosie O’Grady are sisters under the skin, that our differences are simply cultural?
Are the religions of mankind all water drawn from the same well but using different containers?
In the brotherhood of man, our differences draw us together while our similarities push us apart. And one of the things we hold in common is our hunger for mortal salvation and our attempts to cheat death through faith in religion and that basic tenet of civilization, our universal faith in God the Creator, seems often to be the biggest obstacle to brotherhood.
The simple facts seem to be that we are born, we struggle to live and we die in relative anonymity. Billions of us, and nothing particularly unique about any single one of us.
We’ve spread the world over, fouling our own nests, destroying our own habitat by sheer weight of numbers, strutting in our innate superiority, secure in our belief that we are cast in God’s own image. Like birds of a feather, we flock together in our inherent ignorance of self, indistinguishable one from the other save our plumage.
I have to seriously doubt that we are cast in the image of ‘God’ simply because in all the years that humankind have been the dominant (?) creatures on this earth, no one has ever been able to prove the existence of a Godlike creator.
And I say dominant only because we believe ourselves to be dominant; the disappearing mammals, the whales, bears, etc., probably believe themselves to be dominant. I suspect that ants probably consider themselves to be the dominant creature. And they may be right.
At any rate, the question of whether God invented Man or vice versa may well be moot. If we destroy ourselves, will we not also destroy God?
Factual stuff, self! Like so much of our world. The ocean tides. The change of seasons. The sun and the moon and all that we see and touch and taste and feel. The sum of our knowledge of ourselves, of a totality of ignorance so vast that it’s incomprehensible, an infinity wherein we can find no beginning, no ending, of an acceptance that we can only achieve through faith.
The faith of our fathers, that implicit, inexplicable something that we hold in common with all humanity through all our yesterdays.
That belief which sustained our predecessors, those shivering, naked apes that fought for survival in the vastness of prehistoric earth.
That simplest of answers for the most complex question we can pose ourselves.
Faith!