When faith isn’t based on anything or anyone trustworthy.
Whenever
In some cases stuff that’s dangerous to believe. Fr’instance antivaxxers. They believe vaccines cause autism, or contain poisonous chemicals, or believe they’re otherwise harmful. Hence they refuse to get their kids vaccinated. I’m not quite sure what it says about them, that they’d prefer to see their kids dead than autistic… but it’s nothing good. What I do know is, thanks to them, childhood diseases which should be a thing of the past, are back—and posing a grave danger not just to their children, but to other children with compromised immune systems, or for whatever reasons can’t be vaccinated. Their belief in goofy nonsense is deadly.
So yeah, if this what you think “faith” means, of course you’d think it wrong. Even evil.
But it’s not at all what Christians mean by faith.
Well, unless we haven’t. Then, what we have—and this is the proper term for it, even though most people think of it as a negative thing—is
And everyone practices blind faith, to a degree.
Yep, even pagans. When they walk into an unfamiliar room, one they’ve never been in before, how do they know the floor’s solid? Well they don’t. They’ve assumed—and are kinda taking it for granted—that the folks who built the room didn’t make the floor out of balsa wood or cardboard. That the building inspectors actually made sure the floor is solid. That building inspectors even saw this floor. We take a lot of such things for granted every day. We kinda have to; we don’t have time to test every little thing, and we’re seen as needlessly paranoid if we do. Blind faith saves time.
Children especially. They trust their parents. Should they? Not always; I’ve seen some really awful parents. But they haven’t yet learned to confirm things, double-check things, test things, ask questions. (Some never do learn how.) They just believe what they’re told, ’cause they assume adults know what we’re talking about. Again, not always. But again, blind faith saves time.
And new Christians especially. They don’t know anything about God, and are trusting their churches to introduce them to him. Some churches do, and do a great job of it. Some churches do a sloppy, negligent job of it. Some churches are
John 4.42 KWL - The other Samaritans told the woman, “We no longer believe because of your say-so; we’ve heard him.
- We realize this is truly the Christ, the one who saves the world.”
They first came to check out Jesus because she said, “Come see a person… it’s not Christ, is it?”
