People of Faith

"People of Faith". That's the phrase. What renders faith unnecessary, beside the point, and mute? Proof. To instill faith in a system, one must begin by acknowledging that faith is necessary, or, rather, that proof is unattainable. This is from today's paper:

A Senate committee defeated a bipartisan effort Wednesday to raise the standard of proof for sentencing a person to death in Illinois by requiring a judge or jury to determine that a defendant is guilty beyond "all doubt."

In order to believe that the death penalty is just, one must have faith in certain moral precepts. For that faith to exist, space must be allowed for it to grow – this space is made possible by the absence of proof. Close your eyes before you make a leap of faith.

We are in the midst of an awakening. "People of faith", as in ages past, are seizing power and demanding to be heard. They are asserting that their "faith" is present in all aspects of their lives; that it should be so present. Whether the issue be evolution, the "faith-based" educational initiative known as "Intelligent Design", the judiciary, WMD, or the votes necessary to achieve cloture, those who rely upon the bedrock of their faith to guide their conscience, rather than any discernible indicators of proof, must, by the very nature of their cause, willfully obscure or otherwise render irrelevant the very concept of certainty. Well, at least earthly certainty.

A person who believes in the power of the blood of Jesus Christ, and who likewise has faith that the words in the King James Bible are the unvarnished and literal truth, is unlikely (in theory) to ever experience the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance; attitude, emotion, and logic are united under an all-inclusive supernatural protectorate. However, visit some right-wing websites and you'll surely find Democrats being repeatedly and forcefully accused of "cognitive dissonance". While most people employ this phrase because it sounds lofty and has the patina of a physiological diagnosis, it nonetheless accurately reflects the utter horror that "people of faith" feel when it comes to ascribing relative values in the face of moral contradictions. The irony, of course, is that Herculean mental and spiritual efforts to minimize such contradictions are the bailiwick of the very religions that bind conservatives together (i.e., neo-conservativism, evangelical Christianity, et al.); the very same malignant function that cognitive dissonance is supposedly performing in the fevered minds of Democrats!

The upshot is that Conservativism's deeply ingrained reliance on "faith" is essentially a Deus ex machina of cognitive dissonance.