Throughout East Asia, belief in ghosts is fairly widespread. In Taiwan, for example, if a murder has been committed in a flat, if someone dies in a horrible and violent way, no one will want to buy that flat, with the consequence that its value will collapse dramatically.
So strong are the feelings people have on this issue that, if you’re a landlord in Taiwan, and someone dies violently in your property, you’re required by law to tell that to potential buyers. It is illegal to try to hide that fact.
I was once discussing this with my Taiwanese wife. I saw the whole thing as a great chance to get a flat at a bargain price. She made it very clear that she would never consider living somewhere where someone had been murdered.
It would be easy for me to make fun of her attitude, but I don’t want to do that, and for two reasons. One, she would kick my ass, and two, I might not always think in a rational way myself.
To remain on the subject of ghosts, clearly I have to dismiss the whole idea, being based on nothing. However, I sometimes reflect on a hypothetical scenario.
Let’s imagine an old Georgian or Victorian country house, a huge one, with dozens of rooms, in the middle of nowhere. Let’s say I was challenged to spend a night there all by myself. No one else. And no tv, radio or computer. In fact, no electricity at all. Just candles.
At the risk of sounding like a total wuss, I must admit I wouldn’t be too keen on the idea, and not just because I’d be bored. But why would it bother me? I guess I’ve seen too many horror movies.
I may not always think rationally, but I try to. I think it’s very important. In a debate I watched on YouTube, a religious person said that, the same way he has faith in god, his atheist counterpart has faith in rationality, therefore they both have faith. I think that’s just a semantic misunderstanding.
Faith can mean to blindly accept something for which there’s no evidence. But it can also mean to trust that something works, that it gets the job done.
I have ‘faith’ in rationality not because I’m not really sure if it exists but I want to believe in it. I have faith in rationality because it works. It’s the best tool that we have to understand the world around us.
You sometimes hear religious people talk about an unshakable faith as something to be proud of. In his gospel, Matthew talks about a faith that can move mountains. It’s a powerful image, I must admit, but what’s so good about faith?
As Bertrand Russell said, if something is true, you believe in it, if something is not true, you disregard it, and if you’re not sure, you simply suspend judgment.
Blind faith in something that may or may not turn out to be true is just foolish. Instead of faith, what we should seek is knowledge. Tried and tested knowledge.
An unshakable faith? That’s just a fancy name for stubbornness. Whatever you believe to be true, always give it a good shake. The harder the better. If it falls apart, then it wasn’t really worth holding on to after all.
