Image from:allposters.com
I highly suggest listening to Dr. King's wonderful speech and reading along. It is a truly powerful and moving speech and its values of freedom should be held dear in our hearts. After all, we do live in the land of freedom don't we?
Here is a link to the audio and the text of Dr. King's speech:
americanrhetoric.com
Section Summary
The main idea of this section is that we can and should discover a faith in the world around us and to back up our faith with reasons and belifs. This is the view of faith as the golden mean. Where faith is the balance between beliefs with no reason, radicalism, and reason but no beliefs, nihilism. The important thing to remember from this section is that faith isnt only the "Big F" faith of Catholicism. Faith is love. Faith is trust and belief in something's truth when the world around you tells you that it is otherwise. Faith in something is essential to living in this world because if strength and self-preservation are the important things in this world many of us, like Father Gabriel from The Mission said, "doon't have the strength to live in a world like that." We can't go it alone in this world. We have to find something to believe in!
Three Key Ideas
Three key ideas to remember from this section are that faith may not always be the peaceful and safest choice, faith is "the Golden Way," and we have to have faith in the basic good truth in everyone so we can live in this world.
As Father Gabriel, Roderigo, and the other Jesuits in The Mission demonstrated, faith is not always shown through peaceful and safe means. While it may be correct to argue that if they were to leave the mission with Altamirano when he told them to they wouldnt have suffered the same suffering and the Guarani village wouldnt have been slaughtered like it was. It might be true to assume that slavery is a safer reality than death. But it is not right to give up what you believe in due to hope and good intentions. Slavery may have been better to the Guarani, but should Father Gabriel and Roderigo been able to risk their faith and love of the Guarani tribe because of this hope? It doesnt seem fair for them to have to give up hope for the Guarani people to live a life free from the Europeans at the top of the cliffs. So they didn't. Instead they stood up for what they put their faith in and showed faith by doing so.
We should have discovered from this chapter that faith is a balance on a scale of belief and reason. If we revolve our life around the nihilist belief that the world has no truth in it and none of the things were told are the absolute truth. We live a somewhat depressing lifestyle that offers no real hope for humanities ability to know the truth and what it comes from. On the other hand, if we were to be a radical and accept nearly everything as literal truth then we offer an unfair reality where we should try to enforce our beliefs on everyone else because we accept them as the absolute truth bar-none. However, if we accept radicalism then we ussually have no good reasoning to support our beliefs. The medium between the two of these beliefs is faith. Faith as described in the spectrum in the readings book is a balance between belief and no reason, radicalism, and reason but no beliefs, nihilism. Our goal should be to achieve this balance in our everyday lives.
The most important idea I believe we should remember from this section comes from the two of the short videos we watched. In the clip from the movie from "Second Hand Lions" we watched in class the uncle tells the boy that "sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things that a man needs to believe in the most: that people are basically good; that honor, courage and virtue mean evertything;... that good always triumphs over evil." This is a philosophy that I believe that everyone should live out. This philosophy offers hope in a world where hope and truth is very hard to find. This philosophy is an optomistic view that emphasizes that our belief in the goodness of everyone allows us to accept the better nature of humanity rather than the greed, lying, and the desire for power we often see in others. This philosophy is lived out in the video clip from "The Andy Griffith Show" that we saw in class. Andy believes in his boy Opie even when the beliefs of the people around him point to the negative view of humanity we all have by accepting the human tendency to lying and believing that Opie must have lied just like everyone else does so he should be punished. But Andie doesn't punish Opie. Instead, he tells Opie that he believes him despite what everyone around tells him he should do, and that shows a remarkable belief in the goodness in his son. Andy is a wonderful role model for us all and I believe that his role should be followed. We should all discover something good to believe in in others and we should stand up for it even if others accept that that person's tendency is toward greed and desire. Andy shows love for son despite what others think and I believe that is the most powerful form of belief we can find.
Question to Consider
What do I have total faith in? Is it supported by good reasoning and logic and would I be willing to stand up for it if it is challenged?
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