Statement from Rev. Harry T. Cook, Episcopal priest, St. Andrews Church in Clawson, Michigan, author and former editor of the Detroit Free Press
The
words “faith” and “belief” have together become a corrupting and
dangerous influence in the world. An imam, a would-be suicide bomber, a
pope, a President of the United States–each is permitted to defend his
choices by appealing to “faith,” the validity of which one cannot
determine and to “belief,” which one is supposed to tolerate rather
than challenge under the rubric of “everyone is entitled to his own
opinion.”
By faith, the Crusades were undertaken; to
defend belief, so-called heretics were incinerated; on faith, some
people still believe Earth is but 6,000 years old and those who teach
otherwise are anathema; for faith, 19 believers in Islam drove with
murderous intent large aircraft into skyscrapers and a government
building. In each and every case, the particular article of faith or
tenet of belief is placed beyond empirical testing and open discussion.
Warrant for trust in such articles and tenets springs from so-called
sacred texts, the contents of which are also supposed to be beyond
ordinary textual investigation, and which are to be taken as the
express law and will of whatever god is imagined therein. “It says in
the Bible,” “It says in the Koran”: these are the justifications given
for so much of what the Scots poet Robert Burns called “man’s
inhumanity to man.”
What is called for in the 21st
Century is courage, not faith; knowledge, not belief. Courage is that
which enables a person to seek for and deal with what is real, rather
than what is imagined or wished for. Knowledge is that which is arrived
at by observation and rationalized experience. Courage to seek and
accept knowledge rather than relying upon blind belief in what some
religious or political authority claims to be true is the key to
establishing a just society.
It is an act of courage to
face life knowing that one’s light, one’s truth, and one’s strength are
within one’s own self and, because we are not unconnected in this
world, in others. Such qualities do not repose in some unseen deity
which may or may not be caring of our welfare. It is an act of courage
to declare something to be factual because it fits with the known
facts. It was an act of courage for Charles Darwin to have observed the
fauna of Galápagos Islands with no agenda other than finding out about
it. It was an act of courage, not faith, that prompted Darwin to
publish his all-important Theory of Natural Selection which, when
married to genetics, has become the baseline of modern medicine.
The
courage to search for and act upon knowledge regardless of sectarian
demands will be what saves America from becoming a theocracy. History
bears witness to the fact that widespread reliance upon faith in unseen
deities or systems based upon appeal to deities and their alleged laws,
always mediated by a ruling hierarchy and defended by personal
preference, leads inexorably to theocracy, meaning government by
ruthlessly applied central authority and suppression of dissent. It
also goes by another name: fascism.
Uncritical
tolerance of faith and belief systems will lead us there. A
faith-belief-based system–a religion, in other words–must be judged
on the behavior of its adherents toward others, and by no other
standard. Where religion is used, especially in league with government,
to restrict human rights, to bless unjust war, to maintain class
supremacy, theocracy has come into its own. This must be resisted.