“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me that it’s raining.” - Judy Sheindlin

The old adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ serves to expose a false notion that the eyes are our most reliable source of information. There are some charming visual tricks that quickly reveal just how easily the eyes can be fooled. It can be fooled in the eye itself and/or in the brain that translates the visual images into meaningful internal representations. Magicians who entertain us with their magic feats know this very well. Psychologists and certain other professionals know this. Unfortunately there are also shameless shamans living in third world countries which continue to this day making their living by fooling the ignorant with simple deceptions. The Indian government (I think it was - or Sri Lanka) has developed a mobile group of Allopathic Physicians who travel around the country exposing the charlatans and encouraging the populace to seek modern medical treatments instead. From the footage that I saw, it's going to be an uphill battle. Such is the power of traditional religious belief systems and their representatives.

As we saw from Part One, it was the purpose of religion to make sense of the world and to establish order. The effectiveness of which was dependent upon unquestioning belief. How do those people who hold onto the old beliefs deal with the revelations of a modern world that shatter their beliefs and say hat they must abandon those beliefs which gave life its very meaning? How in the European and American continents as well? This is perhaps the most painful hurtle among the traditionally devout. As modern revelations contradict our traditional convictions, it would seem that thousands of generations of our ancestor’s most deeply held tenets was all for naught. But I do not believe that this is necessarily so. Our ascendants used the only tactics available to them at the time and that was forced unity. People, as I have pointed out on several occasions now, simply did not have the education - the mental tools - to Understand for themselves as we are able to Understand things today. Coercion and forced compliance for thousands of years was necessary for them. When we grasp the ideas distributed by a higher education system and the collective wisdom of our time, we are not undoing the vigilance of faith build by our ancestors. We are achieving, through the power of enlightened and educated minds, the same world of peaceful and cooperative interaction that they had to achieve by force. And again, never forget the hundreds of thousands of people who had their very lives taken from them by not submitting to the will of The Church. It was no small matter to break free and think freely. We are not abandoning our faith when we learn to distance ourselves from ancient dogma - mere ritual behavior and thought - we are giving meaning to each and every soul that ever died for their freedom of mind to think for themselves and not purport to belief in a religion that they did not feel in their heart of hearts was revealing the whole or correct truth.

For our ancestors, faith was often a matter of believe or die. Play the game our way or get out. But today we are able to recognize that unthinking adherence to a belief system, as we have always understood it, no longer seems capable in itself of substantiating Faith. At least not by doing ‘business as usual’ in this age of increasing complexity and shrinking global community. Understanding, on the other hand, provides us with a higher level of coping ability.  It provides a potential of connecting our Minds with our inner trust that existence is 'right' (if not always purposeful or orderly); that our lives lived here and now on this little rock floating in the cold depths of space is what existence is, and was always, meant to do.  It was said by Allan Watts that the Universe "peoples" in the same way that a tree "leaves" (in other words it is the purpose of the tree to produce leaves just as it is the purpose of the universe to produce people).  We have the tools with which to understand. We have an education system that provides us with centuries of acquired knowledge during our developmental years and throughout life. We have libraries filled with books and audio text. We have the world wide web; a tool unique in the annals of time with which to “seek out and explore, strange new worlds...”.

Belief is easier - you only have to take someone else's word for it.

Belief is more "user friendly" to use contemporary phraseology.  It's like the plague of charlatan medicine infesting the community affected by AIDS.  To the sick and desperate, belief in the magical abilities of a charismatic "healer" is more soothing and comfortable than pills that make you sick, doctors that rush you through, and a lot medical information that is just too hard to understand.  Mitochondrial what?!

Because belief, by its nature is a fairly simple concept that essentially requires only a second or two of effort (making a choice), and understanding, by its nature often takes years of effort, it becomes easy to see why belief systems continue to thrive. The same reasons alternative medicine is beginning to thrive. I am not trying to say that the traditional faiths are composed of lazy individuals who haven’t the fortitude to figure things out for themselves, but, well, yes, I guess that is what I’m trying to say. Excuse me. I am sorry to be the one to say it, but the Emperor is not wearing any clothes!! 

Accepting Jesus Christ as your “Personal Savior” requires making one simple decision.  Then, of course, sticking with it - which nowadays is the really hard part. People have a nasty habit of becoming more or less Christian depending on the severity of their life problems.  Or Whoever.  Mohammed.  Buddha. (Although He does not require the “acceptance” that Christendom does. He could care less - um, that would be his indifference to what is, after all, just an elaborate stage production. But I digress.) The reverend Sun Yung Moon.  Whatever we have been brought up to believe, depending on our time and place in history, believing is a simple matter of following the Will of the Tribe as we saw in Part Two [link Group Theory section], or a particularly persuasive individual.

But this is not meant as an indictment of the Faithful. (No, really!) Until very recently, historically, our thinking has been done for us - so that all that was needed of us was believing. Theologians, philosophers, rabbis, and priests, the “qualified experts”, have carried the ominous burden of doing all the thinking that was required! Particularly since thoughts about anything as important as God was, well, just too much for the ‘common’ (read: ignorant) farmer, shepherd, or craftsman. We have centuries of un-training to do to think for ourselves and form our own internal Faith. And we will need too the initial faith in ourselves that we can! My God! If the priests could do it then maybe, just maybe, we can too! Holy Cow! What an idea!

Understanding requires a lifetime of study. It requires grappling with some very difficult concepts like space and time and how it warps - resulting in gravity. Atoms and their sub-components. Fields (not football), etc. If you followed the majority of Part Two then you begin to understand. It is an ongoing and upward battle, and must be open to change as new information becomes available. One of the big sells of traditional faith is its immutability¹. It represents a world in stasis that is more comfortable - and comforting - than one that is constantly changing. As I mentioned in Part Two, even the demi-god of modern science, Albert Einstein held firmly to the idea of a static universe and was troubled by the implications of his own equations (that the Universe was expanding and thus changing).

So the first step towards achieving a personal (read: spiritual) liberation is to come to trust that there is an even greater comfort in Understanding - even as limited as it may still be in the Here and Now. It is a Faith that is planted firmly within your own mind and which can never be shaken by adversity or loss. A helpful way of considering Understanding is to think of it as a stranger. A stranger is very often a little scary and is always (if you were taught proper caution) suspect. But in time, and with effort, the stranger becomes a friend. A stranger can often present us with ideas - from a different culture or believe system - that results in inner turmoil. This can be agonizing; trying to rectify these ideas with (or integrate into) our own ideas of how it is and how it always has been, and how it is always suppose to be.

Over and over in comparative theology one has to face the moment when you feel you have an Understanding of Truth, only to have some new angle come into view that puts you back to square one. This inner turmoil has aptly been referred to by astronomer Allan Sandage as the “divine discomfort” and lead him to alleviate his discomfort by deciding “to believe” in traditional Judaic dogma. There will be moments in this part of Faith and Physics where, if I do my job right, you may very well feel that discomfort. In fact, I don’t think its possible that one can gain any useful insight into the Meaning of Life without experiencing this pain. As a chronic depressive I have learned that no matter how much it may hurt, sooner or later the clouds will lift and the sun will shine again. It is impossible to imagine that sun when I’m in the depression, I mean, when it’s so dark, it could only be because the sun is gone altogether. Blown up or gone supernova, but it is GONE. Yet I have Faith, based on repeated past experience, call it conditioning if you want, that it will shine once again.

In the same way that traditional doctrines instruct that if we are to obtain Christ Consciousness we must believe without hesitation, the doctrine of Understanding requires that we, even if only temporarily, suspend belief (or disbelief) until an adequate grasp of Cosmic Consciousness can be achieved. You can always go back - it is said - to the ‘world’ once one has seen the Brahman, or Buddha Awareness, but you can never go out of the world far enough to see these things as long as we are bound by our current and limited belief systems. In order to expand our minds and see ‘beyond’, we have to let go of what we have come to believe we are. Then, and only then, according to the mystics, are we ‘free’ to attain a new level of consciousness. Otherwise you will not ‘see’ the true you. What you will see without leaving the mundane world as usual will be just another image seen through the rose colored glasses of traditional thought. It is exercises of this nature - getting outside of oneself - that perhaps constitute the majority of eastern religious disciplines.

So first we have to trust that we can trust ourselves to do it. Secondly we have to be prepared to suspend believe temporarily and get outside of the limited frame of reference that we live almost all of our lives in. Now we are ready to look into that potentially scary place that almost every child gaining sentience glimpses. As we take a quick glimpse into - the twilight zone. Just kidding. Let’s examine the most fundamental of human questioning. The Really Big Questions.

^{#1 immutability: (Amer. Her. 3rd Ed.) Not subject or susceptible to change.  [Back to Text]}