nature of faith and belief type gubbins.....

Good day fellow travellers,

Whilst flicking through the pages of G2 today i found this rather excellent little ditty. I am a bit pants at all this so i have cut and pasted it Hope that's ok. It's an article about belief and how pre enlightenment it didn't necessarily entail attempts at proof. tres bien. here it is:

Divine inspiration on ice
Peter Stanford
Friday April 7, 2006
Guardian

A few years back, a BBC producer approached me with his idea of a Jesus-lookalike reporter (being about 33 and having long hair seemed to be the main qualifications) retracing the divine footsteps around the holy land. He wanted said reporter to try out the various miracles for authenticity. Walking on water, he reassured me, would be no problem. There was a hydraulic platform that had been installed for visitors in the middle of the Sea of Galilee so they could be photographed amid the waves playing at being the son of God.
The project never came to anything and, if I'm honest, my worries were less about drowning than having to appear in my trunks on camera. But that fascination with finding a logical explanation for the apparently miraculous events recounted in the gospels remains. A team of US and Israeli scientists has just reported in the Journal of Paleolimnology - the study of prehistoric lakes - that in biblical times the Sea of Galilee, thanks to its salty springs and an unusually severe cold snap, could have frozen over. So when Jesus appeared to be walking on water, he was actually floating on a thin layer of ice.

It is a conclusion that makes him sound more con-man than Christ figure, but it is just the latest in a long line of efforts by scientists to bring 21st-century wisdom to bear on the Authorised Version. There was, for instance, the team that put forward the theory that Jesus had an epileptic fit on the cross, fainted and only woke up three days later by which stage his apostles refused to be convinced that he hadn't in fact risen from the dead. Another group of experts suggested that he went into a shock-induced coma on Calvary when the first nail was driven in.

Then there was the wonderful one from some fertility experts suggesting that a rare genetic condition in his mother might have made for a self-fertilising egg and therefore validated the virgin birth. And do you remember the scholars who floated the notion that when Jesus fed the 5,000 with two loaves and fishes, it was really a case of everyone having brought their own picnic but being too polite to mention it once he'd started serving up?

If you've enough imagination, you can always find a rational reason for anything. And with Jesus's story there is the added frisson of debunking in the process what has been a central belief of western civilisation for 2,000 years.

This game, however, is a relatively recent invention. Until the enlightenment, the distinction between faith and belief was rather better understood. So medieval Christians had faith but it never crossed their mind to expect documentary proof. They had, I suppose, what we would now dismiss as blind faith. So all the narratives told in the gospels, the stories of saints whose heads were chopped off and then miraculously reattached, even the notions of heaven and hell, were understood not in the literal sense but as pathways to approach a truth that was in itself ineffable - beyond our imagination.

With the advent of the age of science, however, faith is now utterly conflated with belief - the idea that unless you can put something under a microscope and show that it exists, it has no legitimacy at all. And so every single detail of the religious canon has been poked, prodded and found wanting. This, the scientists proclaim, shows that it is all a lot of nonsense. But, leaving aside the claims of Mel Gibson and a relatively small number of nutty Bible belt fundamentalists, this is to judge and damn mainstream Christianity on trumped up charges, for it never claimed it was all literally true.