Nothing benefits faith like having the author/screenwriter on your side.

[Silent3]

"I do believe in fairies! I do, I do!"

Even in a few stories I like anyway, a common theme in popular literature, television, and movies is how you "Just have to believe!", how you need to "Go with your heart!" and everything will turn out right. Unless we're talking about material that's considered particularly "edgy" or "challenging", most of the time a leap of faith is rewarded generously.

Because that's how the story is written.

And if the leap of faith doesn't work out, it's typically because the faith wasn't "true" enough, or those old demons "doubt" and "thinking too much" got in the way.

This seems to carry into real life with many people, where faith and "the heart" so often benefit from convenient revisionist history, and reason and logic are the convenient retrospective villains. Fall in love with the wrong person? Well, that's because you weren't listening to your true heart.

I don't think all leaps of faith are a bad thing. There are times when action is required, there's not enough information to make a fully informed decision, and one way or another you're forced to make some sort of choice anyway. You might as well hope your intuition or some sentimental inclination points the right direction in some situations, if there's nothing else to go on.

This has nothing to do with typical religion or "spiritualism", however. No one is forcing you to chose a faith. Even when you're in a repressive society that enforces particular religious beliefs, only going through the motions of faith can be forced, there's nothing forcing your interior beliefs.

There are also leaps of faith that aren't a matter of unconditional belief or spiritual belief, but acts of generosity meant to benefit real live human beings, not imaginary deities, where you decide to take a risk that you can depend on a person, not because you absolutely know they are completely reliable, but because having that person know you're putting your trust in him or her is important to that person's feelings.

That type of leap can be a noble act, and I certainly don't recommend against it (although I would often recommend caution). As many of us sometimes learn, however, such leaps of faith often become fodder for sentiments like "No good deed goes unpunished".

I know my thoughts are meandering a bit here. I started thinking about the things in this thread after watching a old episode of "Star Trek - Voyager", "Sacred Ground". While I overall like this TV series, and this one episode wasn't altogether bad, it hit a few sour notes for me, like hearing only one side of the "science is just another form of faith" false equivalency that often gets spouted in this forum, with Captain Janeway playing the skeptic and conveniently, as the script writers would have it, unable to form strong answers in response to the faith-friendly dialog.

The winning solution to the dilemma of the episode, is, of course, a leap of faith.

[trotsky]

1. Let's face it: atheism and skepticism and rational analysis are boring.

They make for lousy stories. That's why even Gene Roddenberry, an atheist, put an emotional and risk-taking captain in charge of his spaceship instead of the skeptical and rational first officer.

[Silent3]

2. I remember the original series episode where...

...Spock is ready to get the hell off a planet where the shuttle has crashed and they're all being attacked by spear and rock throwing giant cavemen, and the idiots under his command don't want to leave yet because they haven't given someone a "decent burial".

Spock was right. There wasn't any "lesson" Spock needed to learn, the way the episode played out, except maybe that (without screen writers to save his ass because he's a main character) working with humans was likely to limit his prospects for living long and prospering.

The episode wasn't even realistic in terms of regular, all-human military units in this day and age. While no doubt risk are often taken to retrieve dead bodies, quite often troops smartly beat a hasty retreat and leave dead bodies behind.

[rrneck]

4. It's interesting to watch

the faithful trying to defend faith in rational terms here and getting their asses handed to them for their trouble. It seems to me it doesn't work like that. The only way one can describe faith is through a story. Trying to describe the practice of faith in discursive terms is an exercise in futility. They frequently wind up writing a product review rather than a description of the experience of faith because that's what it is.

If all the faithful would try making their own expression of faith instead of trying to buy it off the shelf we could avoid a lot of problems.

[rrneck]

3. People who believe they can fly

should avoid rooftops.

Bad fiction is big business whether it's Harlequin Romances or Steven Segal movies. Most modern organized religions offer little more than wish fulfillment without any of the personal awareness and introspection that good art requires from people.

I noticed Oral Roberts just kicked the collection pl- er - bucket. A perfect example of subcontracting the delivery of a feel good product and avoiding doing the real work of being human.

Good post. K&R