House of Cards

David Hayward’s cartoon which he posted today depicts what “faith” is for many people:

Hundreds of years ago, faith meant a response of trust and faithfulness to a God whose existence was thought to scarcely be in serious doubt. The order of the cosmos, the power of storms, and many other aspects of life seemed to point to a powerful personal agent within and behind it all. Faith meant responding with faithfulness and trust to that entity.

Today most of us cannot simply view the cosmos in the same way. But the appropriate response, in my opinion, is not to turn faith into a determined attempt to think about the divine in the same way as people did in the past, despite evidence to the contrary, so that such faith becomes nothing more than a vain hope that an old worldview will not collapse like a house of cards. Faith should rather be a comparably appropriate and positive response to Reality as now perceived to be by us today.

I wrote a song “House of Mirrors” which was at least in part a response to a cartoon of David Hayward’s. Perhaps “House of Cards” should become a song as well…