Friday, August 13, 2010

belief vs faith / importance of ritual

Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.

The relationship between belief and knowledge is that a belief is knowledge if the belief is true, and if the believer has a justification for believing it is true.

If a Christian has never read the Bible, but commits to living a life for Jesus Christ, is he a legitmate Christian? Is belief/knowledge (theology) more important or faith?


At the very minimum, spirituality is the subtle and not easily specifiable awareness that surrounds virtually everything and anything that transcends our petty self-interest. Thus there is spirituality in nature, in art, in the bonds of love and fellow-feeling that hold a community together, in the reverence for life that is the key to a great many philosophies as well as religions. This does not mean that spirituality is a form of selflessness (or egolessness). Spirituality, I want to argue, is an expanded form of the self, which is emphatically not to say that it is an expanded form of selfishness. Rather, as many Buddhists have long argued and Hegel more recently, it is that passionate sense of self-awareness in which the very distinction between selfishness and selflessness disappears.

I do not want to suggest that spirituality and religion are opposites or antagonists. But they are at least sometimes at odds, as in the petty sectarian demonizing that is all too visible in some contemporary religious circles. The conflation of spirituality and religion sometimes turns on the idea that both consist primarily of beliefs. But spirituality, at least, is not primarily a matter of beliefs (although it certainly involves beliefs). It is rather a way of experiencing the world, of living, of interacting with other people and with the world. It involves a set of practices and rituals, not necessarily prayer, or church services, or meditation, or prescribed rituals of purification but any number of ways, whether individual or collective, of thinking, looking, talking, feeling, moving, and acting.

Religion, by contrast, is primarily belonging. This is not, of course, the usual characterization of religion. The usual characterization, one that is embedded in Constitutional law as well as common sense, is that religion is a matter of belief, and that the identity of each religion is a function of its particular beliefs. I would argue that for the most part beliefs are secondary, at best. I think that it is safe to say that many adherents to the major religions of the world do not understand the beliefs of their particular religion, its theology. Nor do I think that such understanding is necessary to either religion or spirituality. Indeed, it has often been argued that the beliefs of various major religions are unintelligible. For instance, Soren Kierkegaard insisted that the central beliefs of Christianity were "paradoxes" and literal nonsense, but that was no obstacle to a committed Christian. What made a person a Christian, according to Kierkegaard, was faith, "passionate inwardness" and not belief.


If faith is taken to be a mode of belief, then an eventual conflict with science is likely. But if faith is taken to be something more like Dewey’s “religious attitude”, a reverent way of experiencing the world and appreciating and feeling gratitude for its (and your) existence, then there is no conflict at all. Science may insist on hard-boiled causal explanations. Religion prefers an animated and purposive view of the world.


Religion is first of all a social phenomenon, and not a matter of belief. Insofar as it is a social phenomenon, religious practices and rituals are of primary and not merely secondary importance. Here we should note the differences between just going through the motions and those heartfelt routines whose virtue is their familiarity and intimate association with the most spiritual passions. The Chinese concept of li beautifully defines this notion of ritual. Ritual is not merely something one does (that is, just going through the motions) but rather something one lives, and it involves everyday actions and not only special services and sacraments. Spirituality is a philosophical oddity in that it requires action as part of its very essence. It is a mode of doing as well as of being, thinking, and feeling. It requires understanding, but this is not the same as (nor is it opposed to) the understanding that comes through science by way of belief.

Like scientific understanding, spiritual enlightenment does not come all at once. It requires attention, work, development, and time. Even being "born again" is not so much an instant transformation as the beginning of a long, involved process. Ritual and practice are not only the expression of spirituality, but the means to its realization through repetition and familiarity. Even the platitudinous wisdom of such simple slogans as "take time to smell the flowers" and such simple routines as taking a walk in the woods suggest such a sense of ritual and repetition. So do the standard rituals of romance, a quiet dinner alone, the repetition of pet names, the giving of small gifts. To insist that spiritual rituals must be religious rituals or to deny the importance of ritual altogether is to ignore both the reality of spiritual development and the significance of individual inventiveness and ingenuity. But the best of religion is spirituality, and the heart of spirituality is heartfelt activity filled with intelligent feeling, action, reason, and passion together.

- Robert Solomon


Spirituality is not something you get and you have forever. It is not an equation you memorize and therefore possess. It is a process, not a result. It is a way of living. The continuous practice of small daily rituals is the primary content of spirituality.


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