“To follow on faith alone is to follow blindly.”
 Benjamin Franklin

I am often accused of being anti-religious because I challenge the concept of faith. What I challenge is, as Franklin points out, the idea that I have to accept the validity of faith simply on “faith alone.”

The whole premise of Chrisitan nationalism (in the extreme) or our government being Christian in its foundation (in the milder form) all requires us to accept the existence of a Christian God.

Why?

Why isn’t the existence of a Norse God, a Zoroastrian God, or a Roman God treated with the same expected acceptance?

To illustrate my point, I’ve encountered various situations in which sincere people who’ve experienced and survived some traumatic event, recovered from some medical crisis, or endured some catastrophic loss believe God guided them through the ordeal.

Since no one could offer any other explanation, it had to be the intervention of God. Particularly those who embrace the concept of prayer.

Again, why?

I believe people vastly underestimate human resilience.

And if one considers the situation in its entirety, an omniscient and omnipotent God capable of such acts could have prevented it. One cannot credit God for helping people endure such horrors as Auschwitz without blaming him for allowing it in the first place.

An Austrian physician and psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, wrote a book about surviving Auschwitz called “Man’s Search for Meaning.” If you haven’t read it, you should.

One would be hard-pressed to endure a more trying experience than the Nazi concentration camps. Yet, despite the nightmarish conditions, people survived. Frankl concluded that humans can endure anything if they have a reason to live.

Frankl observed that prisoners who thought about the future and what it would be like when their incarceration ended were the ones who survived. Those who despaired of the moment often died, despite both types living in the same conditions.

Hope and embracing the possibility of change, a future outside the camps, and the possibility of reuniting with families gave them a reason to live.

And they did.

No doubt, many of those same prisoners prayed in their religious traditions during that same time. Many suffered doubts about faith in a God who would watch them suffer. But they endured.

The saddest reality of these camps is that the overwhelming number of women and children brought there were killed immediately. Male family members were sent to the work camps, the rest to the gas chambers.

A number of those survivors who embraced the possibility of reunification with their families were embracing a false premise. Yet the hope from that belief sustained them even though such a reunion would never happen.

A false premise can still offer hope up to a point.

Some argue God had some “plan” that necessitated the existence of Auschwitz or any other of the myriad traumas inflicted on humans by other humans or moments in history. Still, I think the God part is unnecessary in explaining the human resilience of those who endured these experiences.

The same human resilience capable of survival is often the same innate ability turned to evil against their fellow beings.

Bad things happen to good people. People find a way to endure through their own internal need to survive. This is a belief in a better future, an end to trauma. If one believes in possibilities and change, one need not attribute living through the experience to an unseen being.

Faith offers focus, foundation, and comfort from fear. Prayer may be a way to channel that faith. There is nothing wrong with that. Such a belief is benign. But it cannot change the past, alter the future, or violate the laws of the universe. If it did, I would argue it does not place God in the best light.

The absence of an explanation is not proof of anything but the current limit of our understanding. God doesn’t fill those gaps. The concept of faith in such a being is an artifact of our evolution.