Ishola Alolanle Fatai: The doubt essential to faith (Confessions of a Nigerian Atheist) [WATCH]

by Ishola Alolanle Fatai

lesley

I came across this compelling video of Lesley Hazelton delivering a TED talk about the importance of doubt to faith, and it just echoes so many thoughts of mine. You know how you just randomly stumble on something that seems to have been extracted right from your head, and articulated in ways you know you would never have been able to? That’s exactly how I feel about this talk. Lesley Hazelton is an agnostic jew, who wrote a biography of the Prophet Muhammad. In her lecture, she talks about how faith, without some element of doubt, isn’t faith at all, which is something I completely agree with. It’s arrogance, and much closer to delusion, than faith. As she puts it,

“Abolish all doubt, and what’s left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You’re certain that you possess the Truth — inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T — and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism.”

Real faith is hard, you have to struggle for it, you have to have doubts, to arrive at it. But it’s only too easy to come across people who don’t even want to consider that what they believe in might be wrong. To struggle against those doubts and arrive at a hard-won faith. They choose an easy dismissal instead, and attack any who suggest things might be otherwise. Unfortunately those of us who think this way are far too silent, most of the time.

And yet we, the vast and still far too silent majority, have ceded the public arena to this extremist minority. We’ve allowed Judaism to be claimed by violently messianic West Bank settlers, Christianity by homophobic hypocrites and misogynistic bigots, Islam by suicide bombers. And we’ve allowed ourselves to be blinded to the fact that no matter whether they claim to be Christians, Jews or Muslims, militant extremists are none of the above. They’re a cult all their own, blood brothers steeped in other people’s blood.

This isn’t faith. It’s fanaticism, and we have to stop confusing the two. We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers. It’s difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand in hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it, and sometimes in conscious defiance of it.

That’s a powerful truth that anyone, regardless of beliefs, or lack, thereof, should be able to accept.

Watch the video below:

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