Source: Huff Post, by Peter Rollins.
The common reason why people think unbelief is problematic is because it stands in opposition to belief, that unbelief is a stance that prevents us frombelieving. However the problem with unbelief lies precisely in the opposing position: namely, unbelief is required in order to support and sustain belief. In short it actually enables us to continue in our belief. For this reason the destruction of unbelief involves the short-circuiting of belief. A short-circuiting that helps us move beyond religious belief into faith.
To flesh this out we can look at how belief operates in classically fundamentalist communities. For here we find that the explicit beliefs of the group continue to exist precisely because they are supported by a disavowed unbelief. For instance congregations might claim that if you show no doubt God will come through, or that we are much better off in the next life, or that some of our loved ones are going to an eternity of punishment. Yet the very way these views are sustained is through the disavowed unbelief that supports them. In such communities people still call the ambulance if their child is having a severe seizure, they don’t shoot people to hasten their journey to heaven (or show pleasure if held at gunpoint), or act as one would who knew that most of the people around them are on the verge of unending torture. Of course there are exceptions to this and, as we will mention below, it is their naïve belief that is more of a threat to the fundamentalist community than unbelief.
Categories: Belief, Faith, Non-believers