2025-02-02
I just had my first experience of attending a Christian service today. Everything was just as expected, in terms of how concepts about faith is aligned with my beliefs: faith without action is meaningless. The enactment of one's faith is a manifestation of one's will. As I have come to understand the world, in all of its intricacies, how it presents itself in different languages, and how these languages can be interpreted in myriad of perspectives, which is shared by every single person in this world, make the world as it is.
I am still not sure if everything about today is pointing me towards the correct idea of how to move forward. Or even if I am taking this as a kind of validation of my own system of beliefs—that there is a way to arrive at a kind of spirituality that is guided by reason. While at the same time knowing that reason itself is insufficient to attain a certain understanding of faith, I feel that I am more attuned with Kant's openness to the space of faith outside the realm of reason. What faith is, must be a certain kind of void that can never be satisfied or fulfilled. It is a constant presence of an absence whose essence is often misinterpreted as something that must be satisfied. Faith does not require any requirements. It is imagination, belief, and action melded into one towards the absence of a truth. Faith is always that is attached to something that does not exist yet. The enactment of faith is the willing of the void's presence. We act in faith because we must make something happen out of the nothingness of what will be. It is the willing of the desired future and its creation in the present. Faith is not a wish nor a desire that has an object. It is not a promise but an idea of an event that must be enacted. Therefore, a sense of purpose and duty[1][2]
I am curious about how most people experience faith since this is obviously a visceral reaction towards the world. I would assume that putting your faith on something is commonly, an unconscious choice for most people. I do not deny that it is still within the realm of emotions and describing it, translating it into an experience of a thought is the task that is handled by one's own consciousness, or soul, even. Faith as an emotion is already a given since we all go through our lives having our own understanding of it, even if we do not know how we understand it.
For most people, it is as obvious and as natural as breathing. It is just something we do without thinking about it. Since faith can be an external influence, it is also something that we can inherit from other people like an emotional contagion of sorts.