A Mason's Work

So we talked in our more recent episode about identity and a couple weeks ago we're talking

about belief and all that's good stuff.

One of the things that is important that you need to kind of review or ascertain and

this is one of the hardest things to do just as an aside is understand faith.

Now when we talk about faith it's very common for people to immediately go to their religion

and that's not what I'm talking about.

Your religion plays in to your faith but you take a lot of things on faith that are not

specifically religious.

Religion isn't all encompassing.

It is partially encompassing and it's not necessarily what we want to talk about when

we talk about evaluating your faith.

So what is faith?

Strangely enough for most people this sort of test should hold out.

Faith is the place you stop looking.

For example let's say you believe you take it on faith that the scientific method is a way

to make sense of the world.

That faith, faith in the scientific method or faith in reason, defies any sort of further

analysis.

You cannot use reason to prove reason.

You can't taste your own tongue, you can't bite your own teeth, it doesn't work that.

So when you start to look at faith as a thing it's really bizarre because it's the place

that essentially defies any meaningful further inquiry.

And so when you start looking at this or trying to look at it it tends to get slippery.

And you say well what am I going to do now?

This thing that is central to an expression of my identity that I have kind of figured

out.

Someone who has faith, these faiths, take this on faith.

You'll notice a couple of other things.

Faith is kind of amorphous.

It doesn't have handy easy to grab edges because it's the place you no longer look.

It's hard to really understand where it starts and stops.

So let's take religion for example.

Your religion is going to have a bunch of things that it talks about in terms of the way

the world works.

Some of those things that we take on faith that are embedded in our religion don't withstand

meaningful inquiry from a different perspective.

So when you look at it, you take it on faith that the science is the way science and some

of the religious contexts don't necessarily mash up very well.

So what you'll note fairly quickly is it's difficult to have concepts that you take

on faith that are in competition with each other.

One of them always tends to be the boss.

Some concept in your faith, some axiomatic truth, some underlying principle in your faith

is going to be the boss belief or the boss concept.

That overriding concept will essentially prevent inquiry into pretty much whole domains

of the human experience.

So there are ways to get around this.

So you can again, meaningfully understand it in order for you to be successful as an individual,

the better you understand yourself and your concepts and your beliefs and your behaviors

and your identity and your values, the better you understand these things, the more likely

you are to gain some level of agentic control in the world around you, which will allow

you to create better outcomes for you and those you care about.

So the more you can look into this kind of faith stuff, find out the places, the corners

you don't want to look in, find out where you're starting to accept that I'm not going

to dig any further.

And then from there, work to rewrite the story of your identity so that you know where

it is you're no longer going to look or where in some contexts it's turtles all the way

down kind of thing.

There's an old story about that and you can look it up on the internet, just type in

turtles all the way down and you'll get the story about the way that works.

The sort of underpinning here for us though as free thinking individuals trying to become

better is don't leave faith kind of in the unexamined unexplored pile.

The more you know about it, the more you know about your own, the more you understand

how your faith interplays with your identity, your beliefs and your values, the more likely

you are to get better control over the outcomes you're trying to create in your life.