I wanted to write something about faith - faith in anything - and really only had Søren Kierkegaard to go on. Kierkegaard famously described faith as having no basis in reason and more like choosing to leap in to the dark. It's kind of true of people who believe in science above all else as well, that in as much as one believes, one is leaping into the metaphorical dark.
If you talk to Christians, they all insist that it's leaping into the light, the light of God, but clearly they're too obstinate (or stupid) to understand what Kierkegaard is talking about. You believe in anything at your own risk, and that risk is not just that it is completely wrong or misguided, but also, it's not something you're going to get a handle on until you tangle with it.
And that's one half of it. The other half of it is that maybe this impulse to want to believe is at the heart of a certain kind of cultural experience. We want to believe in abstractions and generalisations and abbreviated, un-nuanced observations, heck, even politics, all on thesis that once we believe we can proceed with action. The illusion is that belief begets cause and momentum of its own.
Look, if you believe something, that's perfectly fine. I just want to point out that the deeper you believe in things that are unfounded on reason, the darker you're walking into the heart of darkness. And it's not even the Martin Heidegger kind, where the future is the shining darkness, projected on to the sheen of a screen, but just brutal darkness that makes the dark ages, the Dark Ages.
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