Local Cincinnati Paper |
Editorial Page
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Tuesday, August 19, 1997 |
| According to Todd Brennan's letter to the
editor ["Defining faith," Aug. 7], religious "faiths" are nothing more
than a blind leap of faith.
What one man calls blindness another man calls sight. Mr. Brennan's belittling of faith (and faiths) as being irrational, without reason and blind is not only insulting to the faithful, but is also a narrow point of view. Faith and imagination are sometimes the only vehicles with the wheels that can take us beyond our limitations. And closing our minds to possibilities (even those arrived at subjectively) is just as foolish as mindlessly buying into superstitions and dim-witted belief systems (such as political correctness). Anyone who has ever intuited something right out of the thin air knows that there are realities that can't be weighed, counted or measured. Mr. Brennan, who believes in the validity of science, should read Zen and The And The Art Of Motor Cycle Maintenance, where the protagonist struggles with the mighty leaps of faith that are sometimes required in science's higher atmosphere. At the altitude Einstein reached, science resembles art. |
In order for Mr. Brennan to apprehend that
science is only one way to penetrate the darkness, he might also benefit
from reading Shakespeare. Not only does Shakespeare have Hamlet say that
:There are more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than can be found in your
philosophy," but in play after play he reveals how spiritual "laws" work:
"how like seeds that propagate their own kind, force begets force and vengeance
vengeance." Many major religious faiths, along with poetry's "flickering
candle," reflect this same spiritual insight that what we sow, we reap,
what we send out comes back.
The Dhamapoda states, "If an ignorant man be associated with a wise man even all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as the spoon perceives the taste of soup." I'd like to add that when we lack the ability to taste the soup, the fault doesn't lie with the spoon. Janice Feldstein
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