Faith is the Courage to Love and Not a Justification for Ignorance
“Faith” today is often defined as living as though a hole in knowledge does not exist. Faith is thought to fill a gap in logical understanding. Ask the average Christian what faith is, and he will regurgitate Hebrews 11:1. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
He thinks that unseen things are things that he doesn’t have full logical knowledge of. His rationality can’t fully “see” the unseen, it isn’t capable of fully grasping the ineffable in a logical way, so faith is a necessary logic filler. Filler faith fills gaps in logical knowledge of the unseen.
The average Christian can’t feel good about his “faith” unless he distinguishes his filler faith from blind faith. “I don’t have blind faith,” he reasons, “because I have logical justifications for my faith.” In other words, his faith isn’t fully blind, it’s just partially blind. His faith isn’t completely logically baseless, it’s just logically incomplete because he can’t possibly know all of the facts about unseen things like God does. He’s human, he’s not an omniscient knower of all logical facts, so it’s inevitable and unavoidable that his knowledge of the unseen will be limited.
Notice how the existence of the hole that filler faith fills is itself logically justified. “We couldn’t even exist without this logically necessary hole in our knowledge! We aren’t omniscient like God!” Filler faith is always justified by human rationality, which deflects attention away from the task of actually filling the hole.
I used to think that I didn’t have faith because of my desire to see the light clearly. I have asked many people difficult questions about their faith. I turned their attention to the holes in their knowledge of the unseen and asked them to fill them in for me. I asked them to look into the dark. Most people didn’t respond well to my questioning. Once they glimpsed the hole that I was pointing out to them, they immediately jolted their attention away from the dark abyss. They snapped at me defensively, “I don’t know! That’s why I have faith!”
I’ve learned that most people’s “faith” is really just fear of the dark. It’s blinding filler faith. The problem with filler faith is that it is a justification for ignorance. People with filler faith keep themselves in the dark and pretend it’s light out.
People with filler faith start with their logical knowledge and then identify gaps later, which they fill in with “faith.” Awareness of their ignorance motivates their self-attributions of “faith.” They want their worldview to be rational and logically communicable to others, so they search for all the knowable facts first before finding what needs to be filled in with “faith.” Filler faith is the dead end of rationality.
I began to wonder whether there was an actual difference between “having faith” and living in ignorance. I was told that I didn’t “have faith” so many times that I decided I probably didn’t. Tired of the accusations, I “left the church” and identified as an atheist. I couldn’t take having a dark hole in my knowledge of the unseen, I couldn’t bear not seeing the light clearly.
For eternity, I walk as a zombie along the crack in my soul, trying to see the whole of it. Forever passes as I find my own footprints. I see that the crack in my soul is a hole. My footprints form a dark ring around the abyss. I see the outline of the absence, I see the shape of nothing. It is a circle. I become the circle and circle back to myself. I am a shapeshifter.
Once there was distance between me and the church, I saw clearly how filler faith doesn’t actually fulfill people. Most people who claim to have filled the God-shaped hole within themselves have only filled it with a word, “faith.” They don’t fill the hole with God, they fill it with a justification for ignorance. They don’t actually fill the hole, they just blind themselves to its existence. They may seem joyful, but they really live in blissful ignorance.
I found faith when I learned that faith is a force of integration rather than a justification for disintegration. Filler faith justifies a state of ignorant disintegration. The hole that is fake filled by filler faith is not a hole in factual knowledge but a hole in the soul. Filler faith says sweetly, “The hole doesn’t need to be filled by God, just by me!” Filler faith fake fills the God-shaped hole and prolongs the disunity of the soul.
It profoundly disturbs me how many “people of faith” have not walked around the God-shaped hole to see its shape for themselves. They conflate this circular soul hole with a square gap in logic. The hole isn’t in the soul, it’s in the square set of logical facts one has of the unseen. The hole isn’t a lack of being in the circle of love, it’s a lack of having the full logical square of the facts. We can’t know God perfectly in a logical sense. The square has an unavoidable gap, it’s always broken, so we can’t ever “have” perfect knowledge of God. All we can ever have in this life is a broken square.
But God knows people through His Being, which is Real Love. True love is not logical, it’s not measured in factual comprehension. The hole people have in their soul is not a lack of head knowledge, but a lack of heart knowledge – a lack of love. God knows people in the same way that you know the people that you truly love. You cannot truly come to know someone you’ve never met just by reading facts about their life. The hole in your knowledge of them is a hole of connection, of love, not of rationality. God’s mode of knowing is circular — it’s organic, relational, developmental, dialectical. God does not see people squarely.
True love is unconditional, it forms a perfect circle. Love has no linear boundaries, no sharp edges. If you love every aspect about someone except one, then you do not truly love that person for the whole circle that they are. You turn their circle into a square with a hole in its lines. If your beloved were to fill in the gap in your square view of them, then, and only then, would you be able to “fully love” them. But your “full love” wouldn’t be for the circle that they are, it would be for the square that you want them to be — for no one’s soul is truly square.
In every truly loving relationship, the beloved’s existence extends beyond their circle’s horizon. There is always more to know about someone, there is always a new horizon of connection. When two people love each other, they join like two circles that unify and spin each other. Infinity looks like ∞, it looks like love. Love is the cycle of life, it spins the circle of being.
People with God-shaped holes do not love themselves unconditionally, so they struggle to truly love others. The hole in their soul turns them into a zombie, so the best that they can give themselves and others is zombie love, fragmented love, conditional love, human love, square love.
All the time, I see people who claim to know God’s love shame others for failing to “have faith.” People with filler faith condescend in this pernicious way because they are self-righteous about their filler faith. People with holes in their souls only tend to see the holes in other people because they have blinded themselves to the abyss within. They think it’s loving to criticize other people’s ways of life because they conflate love with filler faith evangelism.
They think it’s more loving to get someone to say the words “I have faith now” than to actually connect with their soul and love them until the hole in their soul is filled. Through their shallow evangelism, they express their faithlessness in the power of love. They champion saying the right words over being a loving way. True evangelists inform people about love by actually loving them, not by getting them to say certain words. The language of the divine is the language of love, not actual language.
Faith is the courage to sacrificially love others and life. When you start loving others and life, you start to love yourself. Faith integrates, it brings the dark to light, and temporarily fills the soul hole. When we love others, we see their flaws. When we are loved, we see our flaws. Love connects souls unconditionally, it looks at the darkness within people and empathizes with it. Love gives people the strength to look at the darkness within, it tells them it’s okay to look because every human being has a dark side, and every individual has an abyss within them. Every person needs more love.
True faith courageously walks a man around the abyss in his soul. True love shows the man the shape of the abyss. If the man does not see the shape of the abyss, then he can’t understand the shape of what will fill it. Love embraces darkness, and faith is the courage to join someone you love in a journey across the dark circle of nothing, again and again and again.
Take my hand, and I will walk you through the dark. I can’t stop myself from seeing your darkness. I want you to see it too because I love you. I see through dark circles that bleed in the sun. I have lived in the dark for eternity and survived. I can see in the dark. I can see the monsters that haunt you. When I introduce you to them, you will hopefully see that they too are lovable in their uniqueness. Take my hand and this sword, and let’s walk across the abyss together. Let me love you around this dark circle — until we circle back to the light with new eyes. Take my hand, and let’s cross the dark circle as one. Let me, a shapeshifter, show you the true shape of love. Let me show you ∅.