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June 8, 2015. Human Achievement and Faith. Throughout my life I’ve seen people accomplish great things, myself included. Without exception, faith has played a role in those accomplishments. It seems that human beings are designed with a need to have faith in something.
Children find security and motivation through faith in their parents. Eventually their parents disappoint them. (All children are wounded in some way by their parents, even if their parents are nearly perfect—it’s part of the growing process. Good parents remain faithful through injuries and healing.)
Children experiment with placing faith in their friends, but friends let them down too. Over time they become more selective on how many friends they trust an how much they trust their friends, but most high achieving people continue to have trusted friends that they have faith in throughout their lives.
Most high achieving people learn to hold a significant amount of faith in themselves. They believe they are good, capable, and valuable at some level. Everyone fails and falls short of their expectations for themselves, but to keep pushing to do our best people need to believe in themselves. The stronger that self-confidence is the more capable people seem to be of pushing themselves to high levels of performance.
The most extreme source of faith seems to be faith in God. God comes in many forms with various religious practices, moral codes, etc., but they all can provide the foundation needed to achieve impressive accomplishments and help overcome human weaknesses such as fear, addiction, laziness, etc.
Sometimes people place their faith in a belief system or personal philosophy. They attach some meaning to life or value to something intrinsically good and that’s the foundation that motivates them when everything else fails. There are more of these to choose from than I can count: religion, family, the circle of life, pleasure, happiness, humanity, evolutionary success, racial superiority, equality, diversity, human rights, patriotism, nationalism, better government, freedom, etc. Whatever the source of faith is (self, others, beliefs, God, etc.), it can come in different flavors.
Sometimes it’s arrogant. People think they are right and everyone that disagrees with them is an idiot. Or they may think they are the best in the world and everyone else is inferior. But faith can be humble too. I’ve seen people (including myself) who know they can accomplish great things by just persisting and always doing their best. They aren’t sure how great their accomplishments might be and they know they aren’t always right, but they believe it’s worth the effort to push themselves with perseverance.
Without faith in something people lose their will to do their best, to work hard, to set goals, to strive for greatness. They can even lose their will to live. I believe that I’ve discovered the true creator of the universe based on evidence and experiences in my life, but I must admit that people who place their faith in lies seem almost as capable of accomplishing goals as those who place their faith in the truth. Truth and love seem to have only a slight edge in the long term struggle for dominance where human strivings are in conflict. This is a great puzzle to me. Why didn’t God create a world where truth and love have a stronger advantage over lies and hate? Some day I hope to understand the answer to that question.
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