"Belief", Faith, Fear of God
Reinventing the Wheel of Dharma
Famous orthodox twitter poster Landshark once said, tongue in cheek, something to the effect of “Believing in God is a protestant heresy”. I think that is a very important thing to understand. I will now ruin the joke if you didnt get it. The idea is that in our modern language “believe” means something different than what we think it means. More precisely I would say that it is a modernist heresy, or, really, extremely specifically, a epistemological heresy. But the original formulation is of course funnier.
It is my contention that the nietzchian death-of-god refers not exclusively to God, and it is only named so for being the obvious target, of what is found missing once the death has occured. The death is the death-of-the-ability-to-”believe”. I conceptualise it as describing a lack in the human, a deterioration in the human, who loses a skill. Not a choice or and idea or a “belief”, but the ability to believe - a verb, not a noun.
This is why I titled all my religion articles “how to find God”, and not “ten reasons you SHOULD find God”. When I look around the world, for years, even before I started out doing it myself, I could identify in people not just the lack of religion, but the hunger for it. The craving for it. When applied to myself, I found that I had this hunger, expressed in something like “fear and trembling in las vegas”, but I was lacking not only the belief, but the ability to believe. So I approached it all with this attitude, that there was a human skill I was lacking, that I would try to learn.
I affirm today, The nietzchian concept of the “death of God” is a skill issue. I believe Nietzche would agree.
You can have beliefs about states of affairs, but faith, "believing in God" is not a question of states of affairs, but describes an attitude towards meaning and value. Here “faith” means interpreting and interacting with the world as meaningful. Not quite “fake it ‘til you make it” just go up and talk to her, and not quite Peterson “I act as if God was real”, but doing those are better than nothing. You just have to keep going.
Even the conceptualized hope for a future state of affairs to occur and retroactively justify your "belief" is ultimately only a metaphor due to our imperfect language lacking the ability to express it fully and satisfactorally. Belief is a contention about a state of affairs. “Faith” is an expression of trust. You can “believe” in something without “trusting” it.
Otherwise you are still just kicking the can down the road and it's still all Materialist nihilist aad hoc justification. “believing in God” is demanding proof of him. “Faith” is extending my much discussed friendship test beyond the realm of the physical, to the conceptual reality, the realm of ideas, being itself.
The friendship test: I show you my open hand, or if I am a dog, my troat and soft underbelly, allowing you to hurt me. You do the same, allowing me the chance to hurt you. By mutually engaging in this mirrored madness together, we establish a mutual understanding of each other, and the beginning of trust. And in so doing, we perform a miracle: something that breaks the laws of nature.
Faith is trust, and Justified True Belief is the polar opposite of trust. It kills trust, because it makes it impossible. It is also a free choice that you can choose in any moment of your life. See: Kierkegaard Leap of Faith.
The accusation of modernity against Christians is not that it holds a factual wrong belief, but a psychological accusation of faithlessness. Modernism accuses, “it is fundamentally impossible to have faith at all, and even you who claim to have it, don't”. It is not a truth claim, but a psychological accusation, and a statement about the very possibility of Faith. Modernism accuses, all of human history, where people have claimed faith, is all a lie, they were all materialist robots operating on machiavellian principles, and they were all, to a letter, merely pretending. And when I say modernism, that also means you, and it also means me. It’s a little voice in your head that speaks to everyone of us. No One has ever been happy, or honest, or faithful. Everyone, forever, have always been miserable liars. That is something that is very easy to believe, if you are a rootless miserable narcissist, because that means even though you suck, and youre ashamed of youself, youre still at least better than every other human being that’s ever lived.
The accusation is not, “you should not believe in God”, it is always “You don’t actually believe in God, you just pretend you do.” Because the accuser doesnt know How to believe, and can’t map it, can’t represent it, and in his head, the only picture he is capable of drawing is one where you are a machiavellian. Because he knows machiavellianism and he can map that.
What makes this situation worse is that in a lot of cases, for a lot of people, that is more or less accurate. A lot of people today believe without faith. Here I like to distinguish between christianity, and christianish-ty.
Christianish-ty is what zizek describes as “zis is ‘ow ideology functions today”, when he tells the story of Niels Bohr and the horse shoe: Niels Bohr has a horse shoe for good luck, a man says, “oh you enligthened science man, how can you believe in silly superstition?”. Niels Bohr, the navy seal, responds “I was told it works (gives good luck, etc), even if I don’t believe in it”, and an eagle shed a tear and the atheist professor was executed by firing squad.
“Cultural Christianity”, where the belief is oursourced to The Other and enjoyed by proxy at a safe distance, where you don’t have to get your hands dirty.
I could also see this in a lot of professed believers, and far be it from me to judge, but when I buried my grandmother I was crying tears of rage and indignation because I, even as a non-believer, could just tell the female so-called priest didnt believe in God, and was just going through the motions, and spoke every word as if it meant nothing - she didnt really care. She cared well enough about people, was very kind to my mother and so on, but only about people.
Fear of God is awe, and another word for it is ecstasy.
The Elon Musk argument "if you only do x out of fear of punishment, you are not actually good" is exactly reinventing the wheel. Here “God” is conceptualised as a worldly force committing worldly revenge, the punishment you fear is a worldly punishment - physical pain. The accusation is again, “you don't actually believe, but only dress up your real fear, which is worldly retribution”. The follow up "you should do good just because it's good" IS the Fear of God. That’s what “fear of God” means. It is present, in this moment, eternally.
You should do good because “you recognize the world as meaningful and Morality as genuine”, and the natural reaction to affirming these things is to be awestruck and humbled and fearful and ecstatic. When you recognise Morality, you tremble, because it is ancient and titanic, and you are an ant, and you deserve to die. It is not a claim that one should "fear", but a honest description by anyone capable of being honest with themselves about the process. If you do anything good in your miserable life, you will fear and tremble. That's just how it works out mechanically.
Christianity says God is truth, beauty and love. You know what else those three have in common? They're scary.
It’s scary to be honest. Beauty is overwhelming and destroys your sense of agency. Beauty humbles you. Love is the most terrifying of all, because it is infinitely vulnerable, the one you love is infinitely vulnerable in your hands, and you are infinitely vulnerable in theirs, and in love you fear both your own destruction, and becoming a destroyer.
The Fear of God is not “being afraid of getting spanking for being a bad boy”. That is a stupid, clumsy modernist attempt to represent a transcendental concept of something eternal and mystical, in practical, material terms. No one ever believed that, except the dumbest people in the world. And its up to each and every one of us to judge whether the dumbest people in the world are living today or in the past.
Yes. Your analysis is exactly the conclusion I came to reading, of all things, the late David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years". Graeber is a dyed-in-the-wool Leftist, and his thesis for the book was that the very idea of "debt," in the financial sense, was basically conceived as a cynical manipulation of religious impulses to subject the populace to eternal servitude. He correctly observes that there has always been a moral implication to "paying one's debts," and that this implication appears to get stronger and more explicit the farther back in history one goes. So, he argues, what originally happened is that the state needed a way of keeping the populace in line, so it hijacked religious notions of moral obligation and connected them to this new idea of "money," by declaring that the taxes they were collecting could only be paid in specified forms.
Of course, the whole thing is based, almost but not quite explicitly, on the assumption that because Graeber finds notions of religious belief and supernatural morality to be completely silly and unbelievable, that ancient people must have always felt the same way. Ergo, the connection between morality and debt was, from the outset, a manipulative lie. Graeber excludes, from the outset, no argument, and little discussion, idea that anyone could have seriously believed that there really was some genuinely moral reason for paying what one owes, or even that there is a genuinely supernatural valance to morality at all.
Which seems to be exactly what you describe Modernism as doing with respect to Faith.
One minor quibble though: I'm not quite sure that's what Nietzsche means by "God" being "dead." I've always understood that as a way of saying that once society no longer bases its morality or ideology on God--not just the idea of God, but God as a personal entity!--the resulting moral and ideological outcomes will, necessarily, not resemble the old ones. It turns out that God did an awful lot of heavy lifting in making Western European notions of morality, society, etc., function. The nineteenth-century Moderns thought they could remove God from the picture but still end up with a society that looks basically like the one bequeathed to them by Christendom. Niezsche, the mad prophet, is here to tell them That's Not How That Works. God doesn't animate or motivate society the way he used to, and you need to stop expecting things to work as if he did.
Still. It occurs to me that you might simply be describing the same phenomenon from a different angle. I just re-read the above before posting, and I wonder whether you would agree that your description of "Faith" here is trying to get at the same thing, i.e., that once you move away from a genuine, functioning Faith in God, everything stops working.
Thoughts?
Faith is walking off a cliff and trusting that He will not let you fall. It's the hardest thing to do. James 2:24 isn't the argument against Sola Fida, it's Mathew 14:29-30.
I find it very difficult to love Jesus, I just want Him to give me the grace to love Him more.