Wallis: Faith is an Optional Module

The spouse is a poet.  I am not. But you can't live with a poet with out some of the metaphor they live in rubbing off on you.  Like cobwebs they fall apart in your hands, but metaphor seems the only way to bridge the gap between people of faith and their negation: people of square root of negative faith.  People of the imaginary number.  People disabled of faith.  People lacking the faith gene.  People who have had a faithectomy.  The Hypofaithful. The faithless.  The unfaithful.  The fallen.  The broken.  The disabled. The ill.  The devil.  For People of Faith, Faith is core functionality.  The absence is a definable deficit.

For the faithless, faith is optional module.  The base product is people.  There may be some cost benefit analysis attached to aquiring a faith module.  Perhaps the cost of integration is too high.  Maybe no one sells a faith module to their liking nearby.  A few have given up on Microsoft brand faith and are trying out open source, but if people is the base module and it seems to be working fine, what's all the fuss about anyway?

People absent faith don't want to be put in boxes or have labels.  People minus faith feel normal.  People (now 100% faith free) live lives that feel complete, or as complete as one might expect.  People (no faith added) want to be people, but we're trapped in a metaphor.  We've fallen and we can't get up.

It's as though the folks who believe had a special kind of hearing and we were deaf. But we don't see ourselves as deaf. We don't even think of ourselves as Deaf. People +Faith see lack as both disability and afront, because somehow being deaf is kind of like being gay. And as we all know, gay is icky.  Only People -Faith don't think we're particularly gay either (well, mostly...not that there's anything wrong with that).

So now, People +Faith want to give People -Faith cochlear implants and send us to naughty bit detox, and all the family is planning an intervention. Except we never noticed anything was wrong in the first place and just think they're a little odd and talking awful loud and slow.

Except maybe we're more like Typhoid Mary and deaf and gay all at the same time and they could catch it.  Or maybe, we're all dressed up in a marine uniform and getting married and our face is kind of melted off and the woman we're marrying is still in love with us, but they can't be sure. And they're shushing the children in the grocery store who say childlike things and point because we look different.

No one wants that for their children.  Don't you understand yet?

When something is central to your life, other people not having it and not desiring it or even thinking about it very much is crazy making. If it's a disability, they want to help or shame or ridicule as is their nature.  If it's contagious they want to quarantine. If it should come as standard, they don't want you ripped off.  We're all grateful for Ralph Nadar on the seatbelt thing after all.

And if you are on the other side of the equation, mostly it's just tiring and kind of insulting. More what you felt when your fifth grade teacher who smoked would lean over your shoulder and breath on you while answering a question and the smell of stale smoke and too much perfume would overwelm you. Except she couldn't smell either and thought she was helping and all you wanted was for her to get out of your personal space and let you read the SF paperback you found in your parents' bookshelf.

If you find a place where those two metaphors connect -- then we could find a bridge between people of faith and people who don't think of themselves as without faith, but just sort of as people.

And if we all got there at about the same time, maybe the stuff Wallis said wouldn't make people so mad.  Or maybe you could join the spouse's church.  He is, in addition to a poet, the Pope of the Seventh Day Atheist Aztec Baptist Synod.