Unknowledge

Alright, I got sidetracked by the Ayn Rand article. Now to finish off this post I've been working on for the past week.

Lisa's post on the "common sense" view of life was fascinating. It's because it connected with some of my thoughts that I didn't know/forgot I shared. I will try to make this post more proactive in nature, instead of going ballistic Socratic-questioning apeshit on Lisa. Hehe, here we go.

Faith is a funny thing these days. With all the politicization, religiciousization, and connotization (nope, none of those are real words), everybody keeps talking about it as watercooler talk (or internet rant talk), but I have a feeling 95% of them don't have a fuck's clue what they are talking about. Here's the story of my journey to define faith. (And unlike most of my shit stories, this one has an actual result)

I grew up, as you might know, in a secularist upbringing. For most of my prime (hah) I did what any secularist kid would do: I was apathetic towards religion. Didn't know too much about it, was never actively taught it, was never pushed into Catholic school (cuz my mother didn't know at the time how crappy public school was), and, most importantly, mostly didn't care. I read a lot about Greek mythology in grade 5, but that was because it was hilariously naughty: incest, family dysfunction, polygamy, tyranny, melodrama, lust, and all the good stuff in between. Damn, I love greeks. The King James New Testament I got handed for free from Gideon? Read the first few passages, put it away, never cared for it. I have a feeling that's what most Christians did anyway.

What was the turning point? I think my unique situation is that I discovered 'religion' seriously not after some personally traumatic event, but rather an external one. I speak, of course, of 9/11.

In the aftermath, there was a huge backlash against religious fundamentalism (oh who am I kidding, Islamic fundamentalism). But the general trend was going more and more secularist in my society. Amid the abortion debates, the stem cell debates, the climate change debates, the evolution debates, I came out with one conclusion about faith:

Faith is about belief. Specifically, the irrational belief in the unsubstantiated.

This definition is not too far off from urbandictionary's, and it remained a very reliable definition for me and my thinking process for many of my high school years. The debates then, became a very simple dichotomy between the irrational and rational. To me, that is one that is fundamentally fractured and can never engaged on an intellectual basis.

At the end of high school something transformative overtook my mind. I became deeply dissatisfied with the conclusions that I formed. After reading militant works such as The God Delusion, I felt that I was missing a key link about faith: my point-of-view, I realized, was warped by a sense of elitism and better-than-thou attitude. In the end, rational reasoning became something like fitting a square in a round pole. I felt a need to connect with the visceral as opposed to the theoretical. I knew I was wrong, but I didn't know what I could replace that void with, because I was still relatively anti-religion/establishment. So I settled for agnosticism.

Agnosticism, I believe, is defined the total lack of belief. My dad once asked me whether I believed in Christianity. I replied, "It's not that I don't believe in the concept of religion, I don't believe in the concept of believing." That may sound like a lot of word-twisting to you, but to me the word 'believe' is tainted with the connotation of something being irrational. And that is a definition we need to escape: faith is not about being rational or irrational; it lies outside the realm. Faith and science, in the wise words of Gould, are separate magisteria that encompasses different, orthogonal, but equally important aspects of our lives.

I've come across in the past a great symposium of faith-based articles: NPR's "This I believe". Two articles here and here then firmly settled my thoughts on my relation to faith today. I realized why I could not come up with a replacement to my void in knowledge those past years: there were none.

Faith, I believe, is not about believing. It is not necessarily about gods, or God, or the supernatural. It is much more profound than that. It is not about studying sacred tomes for their wisdom and knowledge. In fact, I think it's the opposite: faith is the study of unknowledge. It is appreciation of everything outside our knowledge, our world, even our very capacity at conceptualization. Unknowledge, by definition, the "anti-matter" to our very existence. And I believe it is something so beautiful it is by definition impossible to conceptualize.

Faith is about engaging in those brief moments when all else fails. It is those tiny microseconds when you feel your very self wrenches from its seat by an unseen energy. Some ancient people consider an orgasm a divine interaction with the heavenly. Others report events such as flashbacks just before someone dies. I myself have these moments when I listen to my music. Is this just your body chemicals tripping with you? Is it a divine energy transmitted through euphoria and sweeping tragedy? Is it something else, connected to another reality altogether?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but I think that's just the way it's supposed to be. Unknowledge, and faith, isn't something we should know or investigate about. It is, at the very core, something to feel. Something visceral.

And that, I believe, is the missing piece: the one I've been missing all along.

P.S. Consider me an old-school pluralist/Carl-Saganist/Gouldist, I guess.