Faith + Reason = Truth

Pravda did a nice job yesterday with a short piece on Russia throwing its support to the West, in regards to possible sanctions against Iran for their newly discovered nuclear facility.

Actually, it's not newly discovered, which is where the behind-the-scenes stage setting begins.  One must always consider timing in announcements and headlines, whether they involve uncovered terrorist plots in downtown Dallas or uncovered nuclear facilities beneath a mountain in Iran.  Recall a couple of weeks ago, when the big deal in the news was that President Obama was scrapping the missile defense in Eastern Europe.  This came as a shock to most observers, experts who were unable to fathom why he would unilaterally remove a major thorn from the big bear's paw.  Surely, there must be something in return from Russia, mustn't there?

As the hours and days went by, it quickly became apparent that all eyes were on what Russia would do to reciprocate, in spite of the rhetoric from both sides that there would be no quid pro quo.  But in a staggering display of just how well-thought Obama's (and/or his team's) strategy can be, they played a several-year-old ace in the hole at the perfect time.  Knowing for years that Iran had the undisclosed, clandestine facility, and knowing that Ahmadinejad would be at the U.N. in New York, Obama took the extraordinary step a couple of weeks ago to "unilaterally" stop the missile shield in Eastern Europe, which the Russians wanted more than just about anything.  Then, to save the Russians the embarrassment of blatantly offering something in return, which they simply could not do and still appear to be as powerful as they like to appear, Obama dramatically revealed the presence of the facility when all the world's eyes were trained squarely on him, which in turn was quickly followed by Obama, Sarkozy, and Brown threatening sanctions against Iran (which could not actually be enacted without Russia's approval, an approval which would never come since Russia has resolutely stood against any such sanctions due to Russia's loss of revenue from building nuclear facilities in Iran), which in turn was immediately supported by Russia in light of the "newly disclosed facility" (which Russia likely knew of, and helped supply, all along).

The only question I have about the way these interactions play out is to what degree they are orchestrated beforehand, as opposed to each side taking leaps of faith that the other will know exactly what to do and when to do it.  Did Obama's team communicate with Medvedev's (sorry - Putin's) team before Obama called off the missile shield, and offer to do so only if Russia would back the sanctions?  And did Russia then say, "ok, we will back them, but ONLY if you provide reasonable cause for us to do so - say, for instance, the public disclosure of Iran's illegal facility under the mountain near Qom?"  Or did Obama's team bring that up as part of the initial gambit?  Or, as any Tom Clancy novel would have us believe, did a person on Obama's or Putin's/Medvedev's team simply know the counterpart on the other side so well, that all that needed to be done was for the first dancer to make a soaring leap and the rest of the ballet would gracefully, masterfully play out as it must?

This is a tough one.  They are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are not the same.

When something that you believe is disproved, you no longer believe it.  Simple enough.  Not so with faith; faith is "shattered" or "lost."  On the other hand, faith cannot be proved or disproved.  You have it or you don't, but it can be shown to be neither valid nor unjustified.  That is why, when testing my own beliefs and my own faith, I can find my beliefs to rest on shaky ground, while my faith remains strong.  There is a growing gulf, now a chasm, between the two for me.  CLEARLY, I cannot continue to believe what I have always told myself I believed.  But just as clearly, I know God created and set things in motion.

Did I ever believe it?  Doctrine, along with the process of indoctrination, is both a blessing and a curse.  They are employed for good and for evil.  Humans are uniquely susceptible to, and exploitable by, such forces.  They require you to say "I believe" until you reach the point that you actually do, or at least convince yourself that you do, because really, you should believe, shouldn't you?

Hopefully people can be honest enough with themselves, after enough soul-searching, to know that if they really don't believe something, then merely reciting the words does not fool God.  Creeds don't leave wiggle room; they don't allow for individuals to customize exactly what they really do feel.  Everyone needs to believe the exact same thing, because those who know best - well, they know best.  But when one doesn't even know exactly what every word means in the native tongue, how could he or she possibly know what the original words and expressions in Ancient Greek conveyed?  The Early Fathers of the Church, from Alexandria and Jerusalem and Rome and Damascus and Byzantium and Lyon, may have known exactly what they believed, but it's profoundly unlikely that their exact intentions in their varied languages have been completely passed to me in English.

So do I continue to recite the creeds, to set an example for my kids?  I may be wrong, after all, in my faltering belief in Orthodoxy.  Yes, I do continue.  And I raise them to explore, to search, to know themselves, so that one day, they will be spiritually and mentally strong enough to believe what they know and know what they believe.  And I'll leave it up to God to instill them with the faith that no creed or religion can instill, no matter how many years of ritual and devoted practice they go through.

An account from a contemporary of the writers of the four Gospels illustrates the problem of accepting the testimony of others as "revelatory" to you personally, as we Christians do with the Bible.  This problem was addressed in a post last week.

Tacitus was a Roman historian who was born roughly 20 years after Christ was crucified, and died roughly 80 years after the crucifixion.  During that span, scholars believe the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were composed.  Tacitus even mentions Christ being crucified on the order of Pontius Pilate in Judea in one of his books.

Tacitus also recounts the life of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who, sometime before 70 A.D., traveled to Alexandria, Egypt.  While in Alexandria, he was approached, and we'll let the words of Cornelius Tacitus in one of his great works entitled The Histories pick up the story there:

"In the course of the months which Vespasian spent at Alexandria, waiting for the regular season of summer winds when the sea could be relied upon, (1) many miracles occurred. These seemed to be indications that Vespasian enjoyed heaven's blessing and that the gods showed a certain leaning towards him. Among the lower classes at Alexandria was a blind man whom everybody knew as such. One day this fellow threw himself at Vespasian's feet, imploring him with groans to heal his blindness. He had been told to make this request by Serapis, the favourite god of a nation much addicted to strange beliefs. He asked that it might please the emperor to anoint his cheeks and eyeballs with the water of his mouth. A second petitioner, who suffered from a withered hand, pleaded his case too, also on the advice of Serapis: would Caesar tread upon him with the imperial foot? At first Vespasian laughed at them and refused. When the two insisted, he hesitated. At one moment he was alarmed by the thought that he would be accused of vanity if he failed. At the next, the urgent appeals of the two victims and the flatteries of his entourage made him sanguine of success. Finally he asked the doctors for an opinion whether blindness and atrophy of this sort were curable by human means. The doctors were eloquent on the various possibilities. The blind man's vision was not completely destroyed, and if certain impediments were removed his sight would return. The other victim's limb had been dislocated, but could be put right by correct treatment. Perhaps this was the will of the gods, they added; perhaps the emperor had been chosen to perform a miracle. Anyhow, if a cure were effected, the credit would go to the ruler; if it failed, the poor wretches would have to bear the ridicule. So Vespasian felt that his destiny gave him the key to every door and that nothing now defied belief. With a smiling expression and surrounded by an expectant crowd of bystanders, he did what was asked. Instantly the cripple recovered the use of his hand and the light of day dawned again upon his blind companion. Both these incidents are still vouched for by eye-witnesses, though there is now nothing to be gained by lying."

Two things:  first, should I believe this account, the exact same account given by some of Christ's followers about similar healing powers, because I am told that "these incidents are still vouched for by eye-witnesses" and that "there is now nothing to be gained by lying?"  And secondly, should the fact that there is ALSO a pagan account of this miracle attributed to a different a healer, a different God, in a different land, necessarily negate, or even lessen, the chance that Christ did in fact perform a similar miracle?

The answers to both questions, for me, is no.  I don't believe that the spit of a Roman Emperor cured a blind man and a crippled man.  And I don't believe that the recounting of Vespasian's miracle should dictate what I do or do not believe about God.  They are mutually exclusive.  Too many scholars make the argument that, because similar stories exist in the pagan world, accounts of the followers of Jesus must necessarily be rejected.  Christians will say, "hey, they stole that story from the word of mouth going around from early Christians," while non-Christians will say "hey, Christians assimilated pagan beliefs and stories into their own mythology."  Maybe the Gospel accounts happened as recounted, maybe they didn't, but it cannot be established definitively either way.  So it is left to what we "believe," and hopefully "know," somewhere in the cores of our being, in our hearts, regardless of the persuasiveness of written words presented to us as "revelations" which "are still vouched for by eye-witnesses."

The history of man is a history of taking things from others, or of protecting things from others.

In the case of Afghanistan, we're not trying to take anything, and we don't have anything over there that needs to be protected.  In that sense, it is exactly like Vietnam:  we don't want it, but we REALLY don't want the OTHER guy to get it.  In this case, rather than Communism, the "other" is the Taliban.  And unlike Vietnam, if it falls, then terrorists will once again have a protected home base in a sovereign nation from which to operate unhindered.

So it's worth fighting for, right?  I mean, if we pull out and let it fall once again to the Taliban (and make no mistake, it WILL fall to the Taliban, whether it takes a few weeks or a few months), then it will just be a matter of no time at all until al Qaeda backs up the U-Hauls to the caves and trucks all their stuff back over into Afghanistan.  And that can't end happily for America or Americans, not to mention the rest of the Western world.

There's just one problem with that rationale for fighting:  can you name the Evil Empire that employed that very same strategy in the decades following the close of World War II?  Yes, the Soviet Union.  They were not interested in "owning" East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, or other Eastern European nations.  They were interested in NOT owning them, NOT having them part of Mother Russia, but just as importantly, NOT being allied with the West.  Because, in the heart of Russia lies the conviction born of millennia of East-West conflict that the West wants to kill the East.  They want to own the East.  And Russia, in the eyes of the West, is the East.

Does the U.S. want Canada to buddy up to Iran?  Does it want Mexico to be chummy with China?  And non-hypothetically (since we already saw what happens when this is attempted), do we get all warm and fuzzy when the Russians try to park a bunch of missiles in Cuba?  No.  And Russia didn't want Eastern Europe to host an American presence for the very same reason.  The same reason that we won't allow Afghanistan to fall to the Taliban.

It's probably an impossible strategy to sustain in the long term due to lack of popular support in America.  And by long term, I mean longer than a generation or two.  That's how long the Soviets were able to sustain it in Eastern Europe, and even less than that in its own Afghanistan debacle.  We could only execute that strategy for roughly 10 years in Vietnam before crumbling under pressure from our own citizenry.

The question is, this time, can we stick around long enough for there to be no Taliban for Afghanistan to fall to?  Can our citizens' resolve outlive Osama bin Laden and his aging top lieutenants?  It can if it is presented in those terms.  It's taken 60 years, but we've outlasted Castro in Cuba, and could be on the verge of normalizing relations with the island nation 90 miles from our border.  If we take the long view instead of the 4-year election cycle view, I believe we can be successful in keeping Afghanistan out of the hands of the Taliban and al Qaeda for decades to come, and therefore, forever.  But so far, the argument in favor of continued American heavy presence in that country has yet to be loudly or persuasively presented from this perspective.

A thing happened, or it didn't.  It was experienced, or it was not.  We know it, or we merely believe it.

Regardless of the occurrence or fact and whether or not it actually transpired, however, the story does not end there.  The "story," in fact, can only now begin.  And that is the difference between the two truths that we search for.  One truth is an account of something that has happened, is now happening, or may in the future happen.  It is only as true as the recollection, or the imagination, of the one telling the story.

The other truth is Truth with a capital "T" and does not depend on a storyteller.  It is, or it isn't.  And it is very specific.  When the number 3 is pushed on my calculator, then the + key is pushed, then the number 3 is pushed again, then the = key is pushed, the display will have a 6 on it.  That is a Truth.  But me telling my friend that I pushed a 3 then a + then a 3 then an = and then saw a 6 on the screen is the truth [small "t"] as recounted by me to the friend.  Did it actually happen?  There's no way to know.  Was it likely to have happened, if in fact I pressed the keys that I said I pushed?  Or, less certainly, could it conceivably have happened the way I said it did, even though it may not have been likely?

Questions such as these are important.  They illustrate not only what we know, but also what we can know.  Then, that "knowledge" can be compared to a "belief."  But the belief does not require the knowledge in order for it to be held as a belief; nor does the knowledge require a belief in order that it be true.  They are mutually independent of each other.  Knowledge and belief can reinforce each other, but do not depend upon one another.

This will sound strange to those who know me or my writing, because it will sound like I'm questioning my faith.  I am not.  What I am questioning is something else, though I'm not sure what.  I suppose I'm questioning the truth of the Truth, or the story that has been handed down as the explanation for it all:  I am saying that I cannot accept that what the Bible says is all true.  In fact, I cannot accept that any specific part of it is true, although the Truth has somehow inspired men to attempt to convey orally and in writing the sentiments that they had intensely experienced so that others may come to know what they knew through direct revelation.  I cannot accept that God said "Thou shalt not kill" to Moses, because I cannot accept that God spoke or wrote in English or any other spoken or written language developed by man.  I CAN accept that it was conveyed directly to us, somehow, that killing other people is wrong.  That it was conveyed to each of us directly in a way that transcends spoken or written language; in a way that we simply "know," in a way that is revealed to us as the Truth.  That is the definition of a revelation in the spiritual sense.  Accepting the word of another person, however, is not a revelation; that is merely trust in the other person.  Thomas Paine clarifies what I'm trying to convey in the early chapters of The Rights of Man.

Is it possible to have faith while questioning the human sources which corroborate that faith?  It is if it has been instilled in us directly, which should be the only way that it can be instilled.  Why would God do it any other way?  Why would God have our eternal salvation be left to individuals choosing whether or not to believe the stories of people who lived thousands of years ago that were subsequently handed down and translated into other human languages that didn't have the same meanings and sentiments as the language of the first person to record the story?  I don't believe He would do that.  I believe He would instill faith in our hearts through direct, unspoken, unwritten revelation, and leave our beliefs or non-beliefs in Biblical accounts out of the equation.  Either we have faith, or we don't.  It's not evidence-based, and it shouldn't be determined by whether or not I believe the infinitely mangled accounts of what did or did not happen, nor by how or when or to whom they happened.  If I need to know something, He will see to it that I know it.

And that's the Truth.