Keeping the Faith

Part of the impetus for this essay was frustration. I am incredibly sick of people, when faced with difficult situations, saying we need to have faith in God.

Which is not to say that I have anything against a faith in God, Gods, the Divine, or whatever else people have faith in. But I think saying we need to have faith in some being that isn't here is a bit of a useless statement. It's easier to have faith in a god and wait for that being to solve it than it is to have faith in humanity and work to solve it. And while these faiths are not exclusive, I think that a lot of people do use faith in God to get away from having faith in humanity.

I'm not saying people should have irrational faith. Humanity is what it is, a mixed group of people of which some are pretty darn useless and others are so overpowering our minds are in awe to simply know them. But with all of us, the more we push ourselves and each other to be better, the better we can be. We need to have a rational faith, but we need to have faith. When we say humanity can't do it, all we do is create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Questions:
Do I have faith in other people? I try to. It's easier to have faith in people as a concept than actually having faith in the individuals I see, of course. But we are the Divine, all of us. If I don't have faith in people, I don't actually have faith in the Divine.

Am I someone others can have faith in? I hope so. I do my best to live up to everything I can be without overloading myself (which lately is my problem). If I overload myself, I can't do anything well. But I try to keep up with the commitments I've made. I try to do the best I can at what I do without getting crazy about it. And I try to be the sort of person that I would want to be friends with if I wasn't already me. I don't want to look at myself and see giant gaping character flaws that I can't stand in other people. (as always, this sometimes works better than others).

What does believing in humanity mean to me? It's incredibly freeing. It means that we are the solution to the problem, not just the problem. It changes our focus from out there to down here, from external solutions to internal. When we wait for God to fix something like an illness, people just keep getting sicker. When we have faith in humanity, we back it up with concrete work like funding and research. When we have faith in humanity we know we have everything we can have to get the answers.

We are incredible, both individually and together, if we let it happen. We have incredible power to change things at our fingertips. All we need to do is actually buckle down and do it.