Faith?

I had faith when I was a child. I had faith in a family fractured by language, cultural and religious differences. Violent arguments in Russian. Cold stares with muttered English. New immigrants vs all-Americans. Roman vs Orthodox Catholicism.  I had faith in an older brother, a grandmother and a mother, who routinely subjected me to regular violent harm. I had faith in my physically abusive religious teachers who taught me to fear God and be grateful for all my misery. I had faith in a grandfather, my one heartfelt, safe connection, who withdrew from me and died when I was eleven. I had faith in a neighboring family who took me in as one of their own after my grandfather's death  and then were killed in a head-on collision when I was twelve. I had faith in a Jesus whom I once imagined I saw emerge from a stained glass window in my church, but he never came back to take me away from my suffering. I had faith in a priesthood that rejected my application on the basis of my controlling parents' objections.

Then I grew up. I grew up when I had to make it on my own in the world after coming out as a gay man at age 20. The family, which I depended on, feared and clung to because I was more afraid of rejection, isolation and destitution, outright exiled me under threat of lethal violence. My discovery was shocking and liberating. The fearsome world without family, reliable shelter and religion was shockingly safer and easier than the world within my family and the religion that had tried to subjugate my mind. I learned that skepticism was more functional in this world of impermanence than faith. Scientific method in all things became my touchstone whenever swayed by ideology or emotion. I have made my way through poverty, homophobia, epidemic and cancer with scientific reasoning and method as my guides, not faith.

I hear a lot about faith now that I am very happily associating with Secular Humanists. I don't really understand why faith seems such a hot topic there, to be quite frank. I think of faith as a mainstay of religion. I am certainly not participating in a Humanist community to be anti-religious, religious or co-religious with the religious. Humanist community itself for itself suits me just fine. I suppose I often stretch to the point of admitting a tentative, nuanced faith in the basic goodness of humanity to fuel my own humanist practice. But, there isn't a whole lot of statistical and historical evidence for that belief. I would have to call it a working, optimistic hypothesis at best. A pessimistic hypothesis would model humans as highly evolved predators currently on the brink of self-decimation by their own mindless predation and overpopulation.  The scientist has to be open to all possibilities, choose an operational framework and act accordingly with a willingness to change, based on new evidence. One thing I do know is that there is currently no hard evidence for religious faith.

A much-appreciated and admired segment of the Humanist movement is now coming from Schools of Divinity.  This also strikes me as rather odd. I know this credentialing lends credibility to Humanists with religious folks. But, isn't this paradoxical? Wouldn't a secular movement reach for greater credibility with irreligious folks? While I understand the concept of the Religious-Non-Profit Complex, paralleling the Medical Technology Complex in its recent boom in capitalist societies, I am not sure this is all about faith, secularism or greater good. Not sure, because I try to be the skeptical scientist, even in my optimism and wish to be a force for that greater good in my personal practice and in community of like minds.