Faith & Consequences

Western Civilization has seen in the past 15 years what Islamic Jihad looks like up close and personally. At some level you have to at least take notice, if not admire, the commitment to their beliefs, Suicide missions involve giving your all. The question this raises for us westerners is not

"why don't we have the faith in our faith like the Jihadist do?", but rather "isn't the target of our faith really the factor in the consequences of our faith?"


Each serious person of faith starts with a sincere need for their life to have a positive impact on the world around them. However, the myth that sends us down the wrong stream of conscientiousness is that our sincerity is the most important aspect of the impact of our faith. It is true that commitment does increase the intensity of our effort and the direction of our behavior. BUT, in reality the aspect of faith that matters most to the consequences is the validity of our faith.

Historic Jesus tells us that if you had the faith of a mustard seed you could move mountains. In context of His narrative, He is contrasting quantity with object of faith. If you and a friend came to a river and needed to cross to the other side, your experience would not be determined by how much you believed the river was shallow enough to cross. Rather whether the actual depth was passable would determine your fate.

The next myth concerning faith & consequences is whether truth is relative or absolute. The definition of truth is 'perceived fact of reality'. Absolute truth removes the notion of 'perceived'. If truth were relative, then sincerity would be the only measure by which we could judge truth. The logical extension of that would be that the Islamic Jihad is just as valid as anyone else's morality. We would have to accept their claim of jihad because they sincerely believed it, and along with this, the consequences.

More evidence that truth must be absolute is found in the practice of navigation. Anyone trying to move about the globe in any direction must know where north is and trust the compass to signify north. The virtue of tolerance has "tricked" society into believing that truth is not absolute, yet the civilized world is not willing to accept moral equivalency of Islamic Jihad, nor will they travel without a compass. This is a major contradiction in worldviews that leaves individuals and communities in chaos.

One aspect of absolute truth that forces many people back into relativism is 'who's truth is the one that counts?' In the face of having to 'pick one', culture forces people back into the virtue of tolerance - and round we go, opening ourselves up to legitimizing any faith, regardless of its consequences.

There must be a way to determine absolute truth. We can get a hint about finding truth from jurors. They are not the experts or the eye witnesses, they must listen to experts and eye witnesses with humility and a yearning for the truth. However, their judgment is ultimately on who they trust, not what they know. There is NEVER enough physical evidence to PROVE what is true. There are more tips on faith, but that's another blog. For now it is just