I do not have faith, especially not in anything divine. To religious people, this is a sad state of mind. To me, it's a liberating experience. I had to read a lot of religious poems for this last exam and though I didn't mind most of them, there was one which really irked me. It was Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach', a poem wherein Arnold laments the loss of faith during a time when Darwin's theory of evolution was quickly spreading, resulting in a rise of atheism. Arnold mourns this fate of Christianity, telling his wife they should be true to one another in such a godless era.
Like most conservatives, Arnold incorrectly associates lack of faith with evil and chaos. I guess it was permissible for Arnold to be so ignorant back then, but this state of mind is still very much alive today despite the abundance of information at our fingertips.
Faith is not logical. It does no service to the progression of thought. And faith in deity is actually destructive, as history and the news will illustrate. A person without faith understands the world as it is, not as what they would like it to be. When I first lost my faith, I felt sad that there was no benevolent being who was intently listening to my prayers. But with the passage of time, I realized that everything that I have achieved until now has been through my own effort and not because some god was guiding me. I understood that I alone am responsible for my own destiny.
The only difference between me with faith and me without is that I am more pragmatic now. I do not waste time praying. Instead, I utilize my waking moments judiciously. That's not to say I don't hope still. There is a big difference between faith and hope. As I have explained, faith is the belief in something without evidence. Hope is simply the desire for a certain outcome. For instance, I can hope that people grow out of religion, but I don't have faith that they will anytime soon.
It is no surprise then, that the spread of education is accompanied by a rise of atheism. Knowledge kills faith. Perhaps this is why the fruit of knowledge is condemned in Genesis. Gods require the darkness of ignorance to thrive as they have no place in the enlightened mind.
