Here’s a topic of huge importance that almost nobody wants to talk about. Here’s my 2016 Facebook post about a survey I ran.
August 17, 2015
I ran a survey of 106 people at Google Surveys. It was multiple choice:
What is the relationship between rationality/logic and religious faith?
A. Faith is NOT supposed to be rational/logical
B. Faith IS supposed to be rational/logical
C. Other (please explain)
Guess what percentage answered: A. Faith is NOT supposed to be rational/logical.
60% said that “faith is NOT supposed to be rational/logical.
So let’s think about that. Perhaps the simplest way to define irrational is “the facts and logic don’t matter”. So a person who takes an irrational view of faith is apt not to be impressed when Bible facts or basic logic do not support his beliefs about his religion.
This would tend to explain a lot. For example, this could help to explain why so many competing denominations have differing doctrines. Interestingly, many will criticize another denomination (other than their own), yet never study their own beliefs enough to realize where it may disagree with fact and/or logic.
How convenient for them that somebody (their preacher, most likely) has redefined “faith” so as not to include fact and logic as necessary ingredients.
I’ve been threatening to write a book about this for years, but let me state it briefly here. Abraham went because God told him to go. He did not just take a notion to go, and to call it “faith”. No, that’s what we moderns have learned. We are the ones who will cook up a goal of raising the money for a $7,000,000 sanctuary, and then go on and on about how much “faith” we’re going to have in reaching that goal—when God never told us to do it.
That’s messed up, folks. It’s irrational, dishonest, and irresponsible. Yet that’s the way we roll—almost all of us. It’s the same way we behave in politics and education and in the marketplace.
We do a great many things at “church” that God never asked for—even things contrary to what God wants—and we don’t give it a thought. Meanwhile, this one-liner still echoes from the days when faith was rational:
Haggai 1:7 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways.
Based on my tiny survey results, it may be the case that about 60% of it would not see the point in this sort of “careful thought”.
