Being Right

"...not hurting people is ten...thousand time more...important than being right."

-David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, pg. 118

My Bright Abyss - Christian Wiman

My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this:

William James - The Choice & Consequence of Faith

"What do you think of yourself?  What do you think of the world?...These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them.  They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them...In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark...If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken.  If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken.  Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him.  We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive.  If we stand still we shall be frozen to death.  If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces.  We do not certainly know whether there is any right one.  What must we do?  'Be strong and of a good courage."  Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes...If death end all, we cannot meet death better."

-Fitz James Stephen, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"

Quoted in William James, "The Will to Believe"

William James - Sceptics of Faith

We cannot escape the issue [of faith] by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.  It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home.  Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisevely as if he went and married some one else?  Scepticism, then is not avoidance of option; it is an option of a certain particular kind of risk.  Better risk loss of truth than chance of error - that is your faith veoter's exact position.  He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.  To preach scepticism to us as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true...dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?

William James - "The Will to Believe"

William James - Faith in a Fact Can Create the Fact

Do you like me or not?...Whether you do or not depends in countless instances, on whether I meet you halfway, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation.  The previous faith on my part in your liking's existence is in such cases what makes your liking come.  But if sI stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt...ten to one your liking never comes....The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence
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There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.  And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the 'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking can fall.  Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives!

William James, "The Will to Believe"

William James - Fear of Becoming a Dupe

Clifford writes..."It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

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Beleive nothing, he tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies.  You, on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is very small compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true....he who says, "Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe.  He may be critical of many of his desire and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys...It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound.  Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained.  Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.  In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness of their behalf.

-William James, "The Will to Believe"

Adam S. Miller - The Relationship between Religion & Atheism

Belief is a lure, a shiny, spinning distraction.  Faith, in contrast, is the work to which religion calls us.

If the aim of religious practices is to enact, again, the nearness of what is too close to be visible, then we must always begin again from the ordinary ground upon which we stand.  If this ground is secular, that is neither your fault nor mine, but we must not claim it as an excuse for our own laziness.  "Christians take as proof of the tediousness and decadence of this age what is in fact the result of their own laziness in pursuing the translation task of their fathers" (TS 228).  There are nothing but translations all the way down.  If contemporary religion remind s us a bit too strongly of a dry well or a gaily painted sepulcher, this is not the fault of the age in which we live.  It is the result of our unwillingness to do the only kind of work that has ever been done: the work of repeating, copying, translating, concatenating, aligning, porting, processing, and negotiating the whole settlement, from the top, again.  Religion works crosswise to theism or atheism.  When, Latour asks, "will we be able to entertain a coherent form of atheism, that is to accept the the ordinary way of talking about religion today is through common sense atheism, which performs the same role as the common sense powerful Gods of a bygone past?" (TS 232).  Atheism is not an objection against but an invitation to religious work.

"Theologians should not shun but on the contrary embrace the formidable chance provided by a thoroughly secularized spirit to say that there is no powerful, omniscient, omnipresent Creator God, no providence, that God does not exist (or maybe does not exist yet, as Whitehead could argue), and to see in those common sense features of ordinary talk the expression, the power of religion which may start exactly as freshly as it once did, when it had to use the obvious common parlance of ancient people for whom God was as unproblematic as market forces are for us today. (TS 229)"

The force of religious speech depends on its ability to speak plainly about obvious things.  Religion addresses the most ordinary features of our most common objects and renders the difficult grace of the nearness visible again.  God himself has always insisted, not on orthodoxy, but on the religious centrality of the least, the common, the ordinary, the vulgar, the downtrodden, the poor.  The path beat by their feet marks the way.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 133-135

Adam S. Miller - Religion is not about "Belief"

Religion aims at illuminating objects that are too near rather than too far.  Religion is the work of making-present what is already available.  Religious narratives, rather than conveying us to some distant place, are meant to enact the nearness of what is already given. Enacting this nearness is the key to redeeming the present and unveiling grace. "The truth-value of those stories depends on us tonight, exactly as the whole  history of two lovers depends on their ability to re-enact the injunction to love again in the minute the are reaching for one another in the darker moment of their estrangement" (TF 33).
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Religion should not and never was defined by belief in things absent and distant,  invisible and beyond. God is not the object of a belief-action" (TS 231).  Rather, religion requires something of an entirely different order. It requires that I be faithful to the grace of what has already been made available.  Only this fidelity can redeem the present of presence.  Religious work depends, of course, on faith, but "faith and belief have nothing so say to one another." (TS 231).

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 126-127

Neither the new believer nor the new doubter has necessarily progressed or reached enlightenment.  Nor has either one necessarily forced the evidence to fit a preconceived model of belief or doubt.  Rather, every time we turn our hearts and minds in the direction of giving meaning to our experiences, we are merely--and yet profoundly--arranging the evidence into a pattern--the pattern that makes the most sense to us at a given point on our journey.  Evidence does not construct itself into meaningful patterns.  That is our work to perform.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 9

The call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles and values and ideals that we devoutly hope are true and which we have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing to be true.  There must be grounds for doubt as well as belief, in order to render the choice more truly a choice, and therefore the more deliberate, and laden with personal vulnerability and investment.  An overwhelming preponderance of evidence on either side would make our choice as meaningless as would a loaded gun pointed at our heads.  The option to believe must appear on one's personal horizon like the fruit of paradise, perched precariously between sets of demands held in dynamic tension.

Fortunately, in this world, one is always provided with sufficient materials out of which to fashion a life of credible conviction or dismissive denial.  We are acted upon, in other words, by appeals to our personal values, our yearnings, our fears, our appetites, and our egos.  What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love.  That is why faith, the choice to believe, is, in the final analysis, an action that is positively laden with moral significance.

...Only in the case of us mortals, there is something to tip the scale.  There is something to predispose us to a life of faith or a life of disbelief.  There is a heart that, in these conditions of equilibrium and balance, equally "enticed by the one or the other," is truly free to choose belief of skepticism, faith or faithlessness.

...Without constraint, without any form of mental compulsion, the act of belief becomes the freest possible projection of what resides in our hearts...The greatest act of self revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is, and knowing that a thing is not.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 4