Alexander Liss
The Faith is not knowing something, which
uninitiated do not know; the Faith is not something that one believes in,
because an authority figure asserted this as true and eventually one gets more
details and more understanding about it.
These are usual stages of acquiring
knowledge. There is no need for a concept of the Faith to describe these
phenomena.
The Faith arrives out of recognition of
limits of logic. It is a tool explicitly celebrating this recognition to help
one go beyond limits of logic.
In each such tool, there is a principle of
the Faith supported by some logical construction tying it to intuitively
recognizable images. A developed system has many of such tools, each tied to a
different set of intuitive images. A set of such tools is needed to have a tool
ready, regardless of a type of activity one is involved with at a moment;
otherwise it would be an area, where one could be trapped by the logic.
It is useful to have such tools, but a mind
has a tendency to turn them against themselves.
This tendency is caused by a main tendency
of the mind to discern patterns and to use them to extend one's control over
the situation. It could be possible to tie the same principle of Faith to some
other intuitive images, but this is not what the mind tries to do. It tries to
extend the logical construction into the area occupied by the principle of
Faith.
This is impossible, but the mind deludes
oneself and creates illusions of knowledge and control.
This is a property of the mind, which
manifests itself in superstitions and in even in behavior of rats.
A rat in a labyrinth with a metal mesh
instead of a floor is given a series of random electric shocks. The rat
develops preferences for some areas of the labyrinth and avoids some other
areas. Rat's mind "thinks" that it discerned a pattern of shocks and
it is now in better control.
Often, this delusion happens with a
principal of Faith associated with existence of Deity, which is beyond
comprehension and control. First a person or a society studies “attributes” of
this Deity (creates additional logical links to intuitive ideas), after that
they make a leap that it is possible to negotiate with the Deity, to ask for
some bias on one’s behalf, to control in some degree the Deity with own
actions.
From that moment, the tool, which suppose
to help escape the limits of logic, disappears, and a delusion appears. Such
delusion could be a foundation of an entire subculture.
Healthy cultures have a built-in protection
against such delusions. In spite of this protection such delusions often appear.
In healthy cultures, there is a built-in mechanism of destroying these
delusions.
Cultures, which do not have such
safe-guard, quickly fall into a permanent state of delusion.