FROM THE MANUSCRIPT
In the author’s words
We see through hunger, history, grief, longing, trauma, desire, language, family, tribe, memory, and fear. We do not only believe with the mind. We believe with the wound. A child does not first meet God as a philosopher. A child meets God through a mother’s voice, a father’s silence, a grandmother’s prayer, a room full of people standing and sitting at the right moments, a book held with reverence, a warning about hell, a story about mercy, a song, a ritual, a punishment, a funeral, a holiday, a rule about what not to eat, what not to touch, whom not to marry, what not to question. Before theology becomes an idea, it becomes atmosphere. The sacred enters us long before we know how to examine it. That is why belief is rarely only belief. It becomes memory. It becomes belonging. It becomes protection. It becomes the invisible architecture of the self. A person may say, “I believe this is true,” but beneath that statement there may also be another sentence, quieter and more difficult to admit: “I do not know who I would be without it.” This is the human filter.
Faith Without Illusion, manuscript p. 247. Transcribed from the supplied manuscript; line breaks normalized.
The definition above is an editorial summary of this chapter, not a separately named theory or a claim of scientific proof.