What is faith?

In todays’ London Daily Telegraph (November 14, 2008) it was reported that Prince Charles, in the event he accedes to the throne, would change his title from ‘Defender of the Faith’ to ‘Defender of Faith’, omitting the definite article in the hope of drawing together the multi-ethnic and religious groups that exist in today’s Britain.

What is faith?

It is the means by which we humans are able to get through each day of our allotted 3 score years and 10 in the face of inevitable death.

You should, all of you, read Richard Bach’s book ‘Illusions’. In it one can find no better definition of faith.

An individual’s faith can be anything they want.

For most of us our faith is based on a set of personal moral rules (not necessarily the ten commandments) but certainly rules that allow us to live our lives the way we want whilst accepting that our neighbours have their own set of rules by which they wish to live.

But then, the rules by which an individual chooses to live may be at odds with what some others perceive as being good.

Suppose you are a thief. Your faith is that you can get through life by taking other peoples property without their consent. Is it ‘good’? To the thief it probably is, to his victims it is not but it is, never-the-less, a faith.

The real truism here is that you are perfectly entitled, as an individual, to follow any faith you wish BUT, you must also accept the consequences of that faith.

There are those, the Clergymen, the Priests, the Imams, the Rabbi’s who make their living by organising peoples faith, setting up rules and regulations and using them to control people.

This is a choice too. A Bishop or a Grand Mufti has just as much right to his belief that his role is to lead and organise as those who choose to follow him.

But is it good?

The young Catholic girl whose life is wrecked because her organised faith told her she could not use contraception – the young idealistic Muslim who straps a bomb to his body and kills himself and dozens of innocents because his organised faith has told him that heaven welcomes a martyr.

Individually, we are all responsible for the further effects of our particular faith. If we choose to join an organised group, we abrogate all control to others who will use it, ultimately, against us.

Prince Charles, don’t go there. It might seem quite a laudable concept to remove the definite article and call yourself ‘Defender of Faith’ in the hope of drawing people together but faith itself is a two-edged sword and it could end up biting you on the backside.

By calling yourself this you could end up supporting the likes of Osama bin Laden who, like it or not, has a faith to which he adheres and which, to his mind, is right and proper.

Far better to remove all references to faith from your official title and leave us to work it out for ourselves.

Of times passed

I just spent a pleasant 3 days in Penang, Malaysia.

I’ve been there only once before. Some time during the 1960’s the P&O passenger liner in which I was serving, called there. It might have been the ‘Strathmore’ around about the same time we visited (a very undeveloped) Bali.

I’m not sure how we made the contact but a few of us had been ashore to sample the local nightlife and met up with the Matron of the Military Hospital. This was a middle-aged British lady, a spinster, who had (it seemed to us) totally embraced an expatriate lifestyle with no intention of ever returning to Britain.

Three or four of us ended up in her house somewhere in the hills above the town (it wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a city then).

We sat on her veranda and she plied us with Gin and Tonic in return for which we had to update her on all that was happening back home in the UK. Remember, there was no CNN, no BBC World, no TV period. A letter sent by airmail would take up to 3 weeks to be delivered. People in her position around the world were starved of information about what was happening back in Britain.

At some moment in the early hours of the morning, having sucked us dry of anything we could tell her about ‘home’, she threw us out because she had to be on duty at the hospital at some ungodly hour.

In nearly 50 years I have never forgotten that evening and as my Air Asia 737 dropped into Penang International Airport it all came back to me.

Sadly, Penang today is just another Asian city paying lip-service to the tourist trade. That trade is mainly back-packers – a concept totally alien to me when I trolled around the world in the 1960’s.

It didn’t matter. I was quite happy to submerge myself in memories just as I have done in recent years when re-visiting Singapore and Hong Kong, Bali and Brunei, the Philippines and Japan.

But I did spend some time wondering whose memories were the more meaningful – mine or the present-day backpacker.  The average back-packer sees only what the visiting country arranges for them to see.  In Singapore an antiseptic, air-conditioned Change Alley, In Sydney a cleaned up Kings Cross and Bangkok’s Kowsan Road is no different to Chulia Street in Penang.

I think I’ll stick with my 50 year old memories thank you.