Faith and Doubt

 This week's quote, by Austrian writer, Karl Heinrich Waggerl, is a very Unitarian one: "Faith moves mountains, doubt climbs them." 

Because Unitarians take very little on trust, or at least, on blind faith. We ask questions, apply our reason to our beliefs. I have blogged about this before, here.

We live in a very strange world. Bertrand Russell once wrote:  "In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted." Which I wholeheartedly agree with. But in our world today, in both politics and mainstream religion, it seems to be certainty that is prized. To doubt or question is seen as somehow bad, or incorrect. I find this quite ironic, particularly in the religious sphere. Many mainstream religions, in both Christianity and (for example) Islam, insist that their followers believe X, Y and Z, otherwise they are not deemd to be "proper" Christians / Muslims / fill in the blank yourself. 

The reason why I find it odd is that the definition of faith always used to be "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen", to quote the Epistle to the Hebrews. Frederick Buechner writes, "Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway. A journey without maps. [And Paul] Tillich said that doubt isn't the opposit of faith, it is an element of faith."

We can never prove that God exists (or doesn't exist), but we can have faith that He (or She or They) does. And live our lives as though we believed it. Which includes a healthy dollop of doubt - not taking anything for granted, not accepting anything without questioning it first. I believe we should cherish our doubts, keep asking questions, for this is how we grow and mature in faith.

Forrest Church, late minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, summarises it very neatly in his book Born Again Unitarian Universalism: “We value one another’s thinking. We respect one another’s search. We honour it even when it differs from our own. We resist imposing our perception of truth upon one another. Embracing a kind of theological pluralism, we affirm the human importance of our joint quest for meaning in life without insisting upon the ultimacy of any single set of theological criteria … At our best, we move … to a fundamental trust in our own and one another’s  inherent ability to make life meaningful.” 

We share a devotion to spiritual freedom, and find that the insights of others can enrich our own beliefs. What could be better?