Assignment 2: Unless I See, I Will Not Believe: The Relationship between Faith and Doubt
The words faith and doubt are easy to define, but they are much more difficult to live with. Faith is the belief in what is unseen or unsubstantiated in the physical sense as if it were in fact reality. Doubt is a particularly difficult concept for organized religions to handle—the doubts of a handful of believers, or even a single believer, can lead to a major change in a religion. Thus, as humans are we destined to doubt by human nature?
In an essay of 700 to 800 words, discuss the relationship between doubt and faith.
In your essay, address the following questions:
1)_What do the terms faith and doubt mean to religious philosophers?
2)_How do you define faith and doubt in the context of your life?
3)_What is the difference between saying, “I believe that,” and “I believe in”?
4)_Is faith, in the religious sense, a matter of opinion or of trust?
5)_Are faith and doubt incompatible? Are they opposite or complementary?
6)_Discuss the religious tradition (of the five options: Hinduism, Buddaism, Judaism, Chrisitanity, or Islam) where faith is most prevalent. Where doubt is the most prevalent. Do these religions offer insight into your own faith/doubt equation?
Expert Answer
Faith and doubt are as light and dimness. The snapshots of faith resemble the snapshots of the day and the snapshots of doubt resemble those of the night. As both day and night come in life, so hours of faith and hours of murkiness likewise come. It is the looking for of the spirit to achieve that phase where it feels faith and it is the way of the spirit to assemble doubts around itself. Along these lines the spirit pulls in both faith and doubt. In the event that it happens to draw in doubts all the more, then more doubts will be assembled; on the off chance that it pulls in faith, then more faith will come.
Doubts are compared to mists. On the off chance that there is one cloud, it will pull in others and, if many mists are accumulated, still more will be pulled in to go along with them. In the event that there is one current of the sun shooting through the mists it will disperse them, and once they are scattered they will be scattered increasingly, and more light will show itself to see. Doubts cover faith yet faith breaks doubt. Along these lines faith is more tried and true: doubts just go back and forth.
It would not be an embellishment in the event that I said that doubt is a sickness – an infection that takes away faith. Maybe it would be more proper to state that doubt is the rust that eats the iron, the iron-like faith. It is anything but difficult to permit doubts to work, and it is hard to keep faith. However highly advanced a man might be, there comes a period when doubts grab hold of him, and the minutes he is in doubt the light of knowledge vanishes. Thusly there is a consistent clash amongst doubt and faith. On the off chance that there was not this adversary who dependably battles with faith, man could do awesome things, brilliant things; each man would perform wonders, each man would be great. This demonstrates the more prominent your faith, the more prominent individual you are; the all the more profoundly established your faith, the higher you reach.
One may ask: Is it conceivable to create faith? Is it conceivable to discover faith? Yes, in each individual a start of faith is concealed some place, however in some cases it is so secured, blurred and covered, that it needs burrowing, it needs being uncovered. What is it covered with? With the sand of doubts. When the sand is expelled, the faith, similar to water, springs up.
One can concentrate this guideline in a tyke: a tyke is conceived with faith. When one says, ‘This is water, this is bread, this is father, this is mother,’ the kid does not decline to trust it; it doesn’t state, ‘It is not really.’ The youngster without a moment’s delay takes it to be so. It is thereafter that doubts start to come. At the point when the newborn child grows up, when it starts to hear a story and asks, ‘Yet is it genuine?’ Then doubt starts. Regularly common information gives increasingly doubts; the encounters of common life make one doubt to an ever increasing extent, and when doubt gets to be distinctly prevalent in a man’s tendency, then he doubts everything and everybody. He doubts the individuals who ought not be doubted and he doubts the individuals who can be doubted; there is dependably a doubt before his eyes. No sooner does he provide reason to feel ambiguous about his look a man than the billow of doubt stands between them. Along these lines motivation is lost, power is lost, the identity is lost; man has turned into a machine, an instrument.
In the business world, in the realm of industry, a man does not mind what your sentiments are, what you’re being is, what amount advanced you are, the means by which profoundly you feel, what your standards are, what your contemplations. What this individual is worried with is if the other will sign the paper, whether he will stamp that paper on the double, and whether there are two witnesses who watch it in the meantime. It doesn’t make a difference what you are, your identity, the length of the paper is great. We are coming to mechanical flawlessness, we look for after common, natural flawlessness.
Five hundred years back – this shows how bit by bit the world has changed – a Hindustani artist has composed: ‘Those days have passed when an esteem was appended to man’s identity.’ That is so; it is a few centuries since the world went descending. It appears that man has no trust, no faith in another man; what he trusts is the composed word.
Faith ought to be proceeded to the end. One may have faith when climbing stairs of a hundred stages; one may climb ninety-six stages with faith, and after that one may lose it. Prior to the four stages that are still to be climbed one may lose faith; doubt has come and the entire excursion is ruined. This happens frequently in the lives of such a large number of individuals who are eye to eye with their prosperity but then fall flat. They have recently moved toward what they needed and after that they lose it. In almost every individual’s life one sees this, and the more noteworthy the individual, the more one sees it; for the more prominent the individual the all the more intense his faith, and hence he can see the play of faith. It is much the same as sending a kite so far into the sky – and before it achieves higher, it drops down. The adversary which causes this is doubt.
One may accomplish something amid one’s entire life and finish it, all things considered, yet through absence of somewhat more faith one will lose it, and every one of that was done will be ruined in a minute’s opportunity. To what extent does it take for a house to be manufactured, and to what extent does it take to obliterate it? To what extent does it take to make a business truly prosperous? To what extent does it take to fall flat? One minute. When one takes in this rule and ponders it, one starts to see that the entire world, with all that we hear and see and touch and feel, is all deception despite faith. Faith alone is reality, and contrasted and faith all else is stunning. In any case, since we don’t see faith with our own particular eyes, it is extremely hard to call faith genuine and all else stunning; our eyes can’t see faith and we don’t know where it is.
Presently emerges the question: how might one discover faith in oneself, how might one create it? One can discover faith by honing self-assurance as the main thing, by having fearlessness even in the littlest things. Today a great many people have the propensity to state with everything “maybe.” It appears as though another word has come being used; they say ‘maybe it will happen.’ It is a sort of well mannered expression, or an expression of refined individuals to show themselves critical. I can see their reason; they surmise that it is enthusiast, pretentious, and easy to state, ‘It will be,’ or ‘It will come,’ or ‘It will be expert,’ or ‘It will be satisfied.’ To state “maybe” – so they think – makes them free from duty of having conferred themselves. The more cynical a man, the all the more “maybe” he uses, and this “maybe” has dove so deep in souls today that they can’t discover faith.
After self-assurance is created, the second step is to believe another with shut eyes. One may imagine this is not generally commonsense, and one may believe that it may prompt to extraordinary misfortune. Be that as it may, in the meantime even that misfortune would be a pick up, and a thousand additions contrasted and the loss of faith would be as nothing. A man is wealthier on the off chance that he has believed somebody and lost something than if he had not believed somebody and safeguarded something – that one day will be detracted from him! He could similarly also have surrendered it.
One may state that each straightforward individual is slanted to believe another. Yes, however the distinction between the astute individual who trusts boldly and the straightforward individual who trusts promptly is incredible. The insightful man who trusts, in the event that he is affected by another that he may not, or should not, believe someone in particular, regardless of the possibility that he is given a specific confirmation, and still, at the end of the day that propensity for trusting will stay with him. With regards to the basic man, when anybody says, ‘Goodness, what’s happening with you, you believe some person who is not dependable,’ his trust will change. That is the contrast between the shrewd and the silly individual. The absurd individual trusts since he doesn’t know better; the savvy individual trusts since he realizes that to trust is ideal.
The third step towards the improvement of faith is trust in the concealed, to confide in something which one doesn’t see. Reason does not indicate what it is, the place it is, the means by which it is, the way it ought to be picked up, how it can be realized, how it ought to be gotten, how it can be come to. One doesn’t see the reason, one just observes: it will be done, it must be done, it must come. It is that trust in the inconspicuous which is called confide in God. When you don’t see any sign before you of something that ought to happen, but you think, ‘Yes, it must happen, it will happen, it absolutely should happen,’ and you have no doubt, then your trust is in God.
The main rule of the Sufi message is faith. It is not just mysterious review, nor is it logical examination, nor psychic marvels. The principal lesson of the message is faith, and it is with faith that the message will be spread. We each should work in our own particular manner in serving, in spreading the message, and it is with faith that the message of God will be satisfied.