As Immanuel Kant showed long ago, there is a limit
to human reason. Human reason is an excellent tool for discovering truths
about the material world of our senses, but it is totally incapable of
proving anything about the ultimate nature of things. The terrible beauty
of this limit to human reason is the opening it gives to faith.
Why do I call the opening to faith a terrible beauty?
Faith is beautiful because it can give us hope; hope can sustain our will to Love, and Love is the one thing that can make our lives worth living.
Faith is terrible, or perhaps I should say terrifying, because it has so often been used by rulers as a way to manipulate and exploit the masses. How many people have killed and died thinking that they were doing so in the service of their God, when in fact they were serving the vain glorious ambitions of their earthly master?. I dare say that describes the vast majority of all those who have died in all of mankinds wars. What terrible tragedy has been wrought from misguided faith.
Therefore, I believe that it is an important responsibility of those of us who promote faith, that we also help guide people towards faith in Love, but away from any faith which might endow earthly leaders with any divine sanction. Furthermore, the faiths we promote must be honest faiths that provide for enough uncertainty to allow for tolerance of other points of view.
Honest faith is an important element in humanistic religion
(which is not the same as religious humanism). Humanistic religion must
win out over authoritarian religion if religion is to survive in the twenty
first century.