I just read Liz Emrich's post People of Faith, in which she wrote "... people of faith still have a need to feel that what they believe is, at bottom, respected." I'd like to examine more closely reasons why we might or might not respect religious faith.

All the following is, of course, just in my "humble opinion." I am reminded of a passage from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It's never been anything else, ever, but you can't get that across in an essay.

I'm not a "person of faith," but I'm not an enemy of faith either. But I never expect someone to respect one of my beliefs simply because it is something I happen to believe. I expect to have my beliefs critiqued, and if I believe something worthy of ridicule, I expect ridicule.

The problem with the concept of "people of faith" is that not all religious beliefs are created equal. Religious folk believe all sorts of things, from the wacky to the profound. What would it mean for me to "respect" the belief that David Koresh was really Jesus Christ? How do I respect the belief that the angel Moroni gave Joseph Smith golden plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon, after which he lost the plates?

[A brief digression. A few years ago I was working for a company that had a very disorganized and messy warehouse. One of the workers said to me "hell, for all I know Joseph Smith's golden plates are in here somewhere."]

In my observation religious faith is at its best when it functions as a moral worldview grounded in a mystical appreciation of reality, and this can provide grounds for respecting faith.

Take, for example, this marvelous quotation from St. Isaac of Nineveh from the 8th century:

And what is a merciful heart? - It is the heart’s burning for the sake of the entire creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, and for every created thing; and by the recollection of them the eyes of a merciful man pour forth abundant tears. From the strong and vehement mercy which grips his heart and from his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in creation. For this reason he offers up tearful prayer continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those who harm him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner he even prays for the family of reptiles because of the great compassion that burns without measure in his heart in the likeness of God.

The problem is that faith often also tries to explain particular details about the world. As Paul Woodruff noted in his book Reverence, "many of us are awestruck when we contemplate the design we are able to find in nature or the universe, and from awe we quickly find our way to reverence. So far so good. But if we find our way also to specific beliefs about creation or theology, we can only do so by way of one fallacy afer another." [p. 124, emphasis mine]

Another basis for respect of religious faith is the extent to which it creates people who act morally. As Miguel de Unamuno noted in his The Tragic Sense of Life, "Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory" -- proof here being understood as personal and existential rather than as logical and rational. For de Unamuno, the life of the believer actually creates faith: "Virtue, therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith."

Any supposed spiritual insight or worldview must be tested against an ethical standard. Is it any wonder that many people reject fundamentalism, not just because they disagree with the beliefs, but because they are unimpressed by the fundamentalists's lives, and see that fundamentalism leads not to an ethical worldview, but to a stale and lifeless literalism that often has little relationship to the realities of their lives? Good religion creates faith; bad religion creates unbelief. Many people who fall away from Christianity do so not because of any rational argument, but because of ill-treatment at the hands of their fellow believers.

Religious faith can also give the believer great personal insight. Russian Orthodox writer Metropolitan Anthony Bloom notes that

". . . prayer is a search, an exploration of this invisible world of our own depths which God alone knows and he alone can reveal to us. . . . And it is by prayer, gropingly at first, in the dawn of a new vision, that we seek and find God and ourselves in a co-relative way. . . Throughout the day we are a succession of social personalities, sometimes unrecognizable to others or even to ourselves. And when the time comes to pray and we want to present ourselves to God we often feel lost because we do not know which of these social personalities is the true human identify. The several successive persons that we present to God are not ourselves. There is something of us in each of them but the whole person is missing."

In other words, in the Orthodox tradition, when you find God, you find your true self; when you find your true self, you find God. But that's not the whole story. In finding the true interior self, the believer is led back out into the world in a life of compassion for those who suffer. Bloom writes

But praying for others is also going the way of Christ, becoming an expression of his intercession, uniting ourselves with him in his prayer and his incarnation. We experience the unutterable groans of the Spirit in our own hearts. And the greater our sympathy and the more closely we identify through compassion with those for whom we pray, the more perfect is our communion with the merciful God. Our prayer rising out of human suffering leads us to the heart of God's mystery.

For the believer a profound religious experience leads not to a life of ease and satisfaction, but to the center of the most difficult issue of all, the question of suffering. Suffering forces the believer to go deeply within himself, in an effort to make sense of things. And in that effort he is forced to confront fundamental issues -- mortality, injustice, loss, meaninglessness. To be human is to have an existence that is continually marked by these realities. To be a spiritual human is to allow oneself to be confronted by these realities, and in fact to embrace them as an essential part of existence.

Unfortunately, most American Christians have become preoccupied with wanting to be happy, prosperous, and successful. They have forgotten the words of the gospel: "Whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple." Christianity without the cross leads to materialism and indifference to the suffering of others, leading to a faith empty of love. As de Unamuno wrote

"There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. And love leads us to no other happiness than that of love itself and its tragic consolation of uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love."

Today, much of the spiritual and mystical aspect of faith has been drained out of American Christianity, leaving an empty shell consisting of "doctrines" and "values" that in my opinion is not worthy of respect. Fortunately, that is not the case for all believers, and there are many whose faith deserves respect, even from those of us who are not people of faith.