In his encyclical on faith, Pope Francis described the Christian faith as a defence against the “massive amnesia in our contemporary world”. This amnesia equally applies to those who fall under the spell of religion: “the opium of the people”!
The religious amnesia starts when the believer takes his first steps in his studies. He is taught to subdue his reason and to deny the evidence of his senses. He never questions “whether flesh be bread or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine” (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels).
Helvetius observed in his treatise On Man: “In every religion, the first objective of the priests is to stifle the curiosity of men, to prevent the examination of every dogma whose absurdity is too palpable to be concealed.”
As he grows older, the believer learns to suppress the scepticism that hides in the heart of faith. On other occasions, “a secret incredulity in the individual frequently opposes the pernicious effect of religious indoctrination” (Helvetius).
Pope Francis wrote that the amnesia in today’s world was partly caused by “the subjective truths of the individual” which include the subjective “truths” of faith! Every religious man believes that he possesses the one true faith while rejecting all the rest, just as Cardinal Ratzinger did when he offended Anglicans and Lutherans by declaring that those who were not Catholic had “defects” in their Church or beliefs.
Faith is a matter of geography. If Pope Francis had been born a few hundred miles south of the Vatican, he would have been a Muslim imam preaching the Koran!
The amnesia of faith is not confined to the credulous populace but is also found among highly intelligent people, especially if they are sick or depressed. The mathematician Blaise Pascal, the chemist Robert Boyle, and the entomologist Jan Swammerdam retreated from science to religion after their health broke down.
Their retreat from science to religion, observed the historian Will Durant, “personified the hesitation of modern man between a search for truth that smiles at hope and a retreat to hopes that shy from truth”.
John Guillaumier
ST JULIAN’S