Skip to main content

Breaking the Ice of Faith -- Writer's Poke #352




Pawel and his dad performed careful calculations, and they knew that the ice would safely support someone three times Pawel’s weight. Nevertheless, the ice broke, and Pawel drowned. 

People from the apartment complex gathered around the lake to watch the emergency crews at work, but the onlookers, including Pawel’s dad and aunt, were helpless to do anything. All they could do was watch as the frozen, lifeless bodies of Pawel and two of his friends were pulled out of the icy grave. 

At the sight of the bodies, all of the onlookers, except for Pawel’s dad, began to kneel. They did so as a sign of their continued faith. Pawel’s dad remained standing because he lacked the faith to submit to the mystery of his son’s death. Although he rationally knew why all living things must die, he couldn’t fathom why someone like his son should have to die before his time. His rational understanding of death offered no comfort at this moment of tragedy.

Faith offers comfort, but are there any limitations to faith? For example, one might argue that Pawel’s dad had “faith” in his calculations, but those calculations failed him for reasons beyond his control. As an agnostic, his faith in God was not strong to begin with, but he certainly must have felt that if God exists, He had failed him as well. Why is or isn’t it appropriate for Pawel’s dad to feel this way about God?

"Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe." -- Voltaire

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

I'm not a preacher, but if you follow the teachings of Jesus, it was he who said: Do to others as you would have them do to you. That's from Luke 6:31 , and reading all of Luke 6 isn't a bad way to spend five minutes of your time.  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%206&version=NIV I guess a lot of Christians understand the Golden Rule and practice it in their daily lives. Others, however, especially political Christians (and specifically those promoting Christian Nationalism) seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They don't care about humanitarian issues. They claim they either don't exist, aren't the problem of the United States, or are the fault of the victims. They counter with distractions like, "Why do you care so much about THEM when you should be caring about the REAL people who matter?" Sorry, but I don't recall Jesus ever dividing people into those who matter more and those who matter less. Of course, Jesus also said not to j...

Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it.  Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years.  Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him.  Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog.  https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...