Blind faith

Reader question:

Please explain this sentence, particularly “blind faith”: Like so many other students, Mikhail took out her loans on a kind of “blind faith” that she could deal with the consequences.

My comments:

She borrowed money (took out her loans) in order to complete school. Now she’s finding it difficult to pay back those loans.

At any rate, that’s the feeling I get from the tone of the sentence, especially “blind faith”. I hope she’ll eventually be debt free but for now, let’s, well, dwell on “blind faith” a little bit.

Faith, you see, is a strong, fervent belief. To have faith is a much stronger feeling than to have belief in something. Belief is a reasonable trust in something being true. We, for example, may choose to believe or not believe whether someone tells the truth in court based on what they say and the manner in which they say it.

Faith, on the other hand, is a belief so strong that it goes beyond reason, or the rational process.

Hence the term blind faith – blind as in blind love.

Religious faith is sometimes called blind faith because religion often asks for total obedience without questioning.

I once had a heated intellectual discussion with a devout Christian with his new-found religion but in a matter of seconds we were able to reach the conclusion that we had to agree not to agree because neither one of us was going to convince the other.

When he said God created man and the Earth, you see, I immediately tried to reason with him, saying that it’s the other way around, that men created religion including the Christian God.

I tried to give my reasons further but he would not listen. “You don’t have faith”, he kept on saying, over and over again.

To have blind faith is like that. You have total trust and confidence in someone or something without evidence or reason.

To be fair, it’s easy for me to say. I am a nonbeliever. I don’t believe in organized religion of any kind. In fact, I don’t believe in organizations per see.

I mean I don’t have blind faith in them.

Anyways, in our example, Mikhail had blind faith, a total trust and confidence in her ability to pay back her loans without going through a thorough rational process.

If anyone asked her how she supposed she could repay her debt after graduation, she would probably have said something along these lines: “Of course I can. I’ll get a job right away and pay it back in no time.”

What if she couldn’t find a job?

Well, that’s the thing.

I mean that’s the thing with blind faith. You don’t ask questions like that.

Alright, here are media examples of “blind faith”:

1. He is known for making good cinema, but Dibakar Banerjee warns actors against having blind faith in any director. He suggests that one should give importance to script.

“No actor should trust a director blindly. All good actors should trust only the script. My film scripts are ready a year before I go and show it to the actors. In ‘Shanghai’, there are three actors -- Abhay Deol, Emraan Hashmi and the script,” Dibakar told IANS.

All the way from “Khosla Ka Ghosla” to “Shanghai”, Dibakar’s movies have been loved by the audience. He usually picks up unconventional topics and his latest flick, “Shanghai”, is no exception.

Dibakar says despite successful films in his kitty, he is worried about the response to “Shanghai” that also features Kalki Koechlin and Prosenjit Chatterjee. It is releasing June 8.

- No actor should trust director blindly: Dibakar Banerjee, Indo Asian News Service, May 11, 2017.

2. Germany has expelled the CIA station chief in Berlin.

This appears to be a dramatic display of anger from the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel at Washington after officials said they had discovered two suspected US spies.

The alleged spies were only unmasked because they were suspected to work for Russia.

“One has been expecting anything from China and Russia while having blind faith in America, but these times are over”, says André Hahn of the Opposition Die Linke. His party has also demanded serious actions.

Angela Merkel made a clear statement regarding the case after keeping quiet for so long: “If the allegations prove to be true, looking at it from the basis of good common sense, spying on allies is a waste of energy.“

- Germany orders top CIA official to leave, PressTV.ir, July 11, 2017.

3. If a brain can be scanned, it can, theoretically, be mapped out and uploaded on to a computer, opening up the possibility of a digital resurrection, if not a physical one.

Still, it’s a giant unknown. If, hypothetically, we imagine Du Hong’s brain could be brought back to life, would she exist in the same form? Would she still be able to speak Mandarin?

“Oh jeez,” says Kowalski. There is a long pause. “Here’s what I believe: I believe every single person we have here can be brought back as far as their DNA is concerned. How much of the mind we can save is a matter of variables, like: did we get to the patient right away? The sooner you get to the person, the more likely you are to have their mind.”

Kowalski, who works as a paramedic (his role at the Cryonics Institute is unpaid), compares it to someone suffering a stroke: the quicker the intervention, the more hope there is of a full recovery. But he admits much of this is just guesswork and blind faith.

Isn’t it all a bit, well, weird?

“Before the first heart transplant, everyone thought that was a bit weird too,” he says. “When you think about it, you think Frankenstein, right? Yet that’s exactly what people felt about organ transplantations and look how many lives have been saved and enriched by that.”

- Dying is the last thing anyone wants to do – so keep cool and carry on, TheGuardian.com, October 11, 2017.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.