Faith In What?
I was recently asked to define faith. Here goes.
Faith is plain old belief. There is no faith in general. No faith without a referent. The effort to suggest otherwise is a handy rhetorical tool for abusers. Have you noticed? If someone identifies as a person of faith, as fascists often do, we have to keep asking, faith in what exactly?
When someone speaks of their faith (Man of faith, Woman of faith) and one asks that very basic question: Faith in what? This isn’t an attack upon the person or their faith. It’s a show of respect and even self-respect, especially if the person intoning the word “faith” wishes to be accorded public trust or granted power of others.
An unexamined faith is not worth having.
Faith is a lovely word so long as it isn’t shorn of referent in its deployment. There’s folks who conduct their bloom in good faith. There’s bad faith operatives here and there.
You’ll know us by our fruit.
That last line
Faith in a Supreme Being, and that Jesus is the Christ, the Messaiah, who died, rose from the dead and offers eternal life. And as I say this I am a firm opponent of the this right-wing, "Christian" nationalist bullshit. Too many "people of faith" today are hypocrites who would step over their own mother lying in the street in order to rail at "trans ideology" and "wokeness." Such people disgust me because they are NOT people "of faith."