Matters of Faith

"When I was a child, I thought as a child." I accepted the beliefs and teachings of those who were important to me. It was inconceivable that they could be wrong. If my mother was wrong, what safety was there in my infant world?

Later I was able to look with a little more safety at the wider picture, and to ask questions such as: what would I believe now if I had been brought up as a Jew, Hindu or Buddhist?

I began to question what claim any ancient scripture had to being more authoritative than any other. Jews maintain that the Torah is the word of God. Christians make the same claim for the Bible. Is either of these claims any better than a claim that the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita or the teachings of the Buddha might be the word of God?

Until questions such as these can be answered with some degree of certainty, supporting arguments by quoting from any of these sources is pointless; unless the discussion is about the relative merits of the morals and ethics of the various teachings.

My belief? There can never have been a time when there was nothing, otherwise there would be nothing now.

If that belief is correct, then creation, evolution, belief and scientific enquiry all operate within the framework of an eternal/infinite reality. What the precise nature of that reality is, I don't know, and I strongly suspect no one else does.

One thing I am fairly sure of is that we all have a right to our beliefs, and, if we need to, to defend our beliefs.

I think we have a right to question the beliefs of others, if they bring their beliefs into an arena of discussion, but I think we should do so with courtesy and sensitivity. If another person is obviously afraid to question his/her beliefs and resorts to anger or abuse as a defence, I think we should acknowledge that fear as being very real, and, perhaps, back off, as a matter of sensitivity.

I also believe that I have no right to tell anyone else that his/her beliefs are wrong, and mine are right. I believe I have the right to similar courtesy in return, and that others also have that right.


There never was nothing.