Fear is faith in reverse gear.
— Napoleon Hill, American author
FROM womb to tomb, we are said to be dancing to the music of our DNA while struggling to justify faith and fear vacillating in our lives as fact, value, companion, crutch and curse.
The law is a perfect example of faith and fear co-existing, co-dependent, co-equal and coalescing sometimes to a boiling point. Seeking total safety and security with established government, citizens grudgingly accept faith and fear. Its footprints and fingerprints are legion.
“Faith and fear both demand you believe in something you cannot see. You choose,” observed a theologian. He was urging his listeners to rise above the obvious, the natural, to an intangible reality that may free us from one and not the other.
Feed your faith and fear will starve to death, suggested a reluctant politician. The caring rakyat who speak up when things go terribly awry know this truism for a fact. Their continuous cries of outrage must shake the establishment to its stinky core.
The faith in politics and government must generate a genuine fear for the incompetents that change and reform will inevitably ruin their dismal future. It is this genre of fear that is most welcome to faithfully uproot the fearsome and the fearful who are given a nepotistic opportunity to lead.
It has been speculated that the only known cure for fear is faith. Undi18 seems to fit this narrative.
A rare exercise of faith that inspired amendments to Article 119(1)(a) Federal Constitution (FC) to lower the voting age to 18 years. This faith must necessarily arouse real fear amongst the old and older who must feel the rush to vacate their seats in favour of fresh blood.
There is genuine fear that the right to vote is not stipulated in the fundamental liberties of the FC encompassing Articles 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13. The right to vote may be couched in ambiguous language as the “right to form associations” in Article 10 (1)(c) FC which has become a great leap of faith to the frog culture.
Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the staircase, observed the great American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. This is a fitting tribute to the reliance on Undi18 when young voters will place their trust in the untried and untested whose public-speaking skills will be deemed a secondary skill.
Fear and faith cannot live in the same house, remarked 32nd US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who witnessed the Great Depression and the bombing of Pearl Harbour during his watch. “The only thing to fear is fear itself,” he said to stave off an attack on faith in the American armed forces.
Fear can keep us up all night, but faith makes one fine pillow, observed an American writer who battled fear long enough to overcome it. It is human nature to easily give in to fear. But it takes a superhuman effort to develop faith to overcome fear.
American anthropologist Ernest Becker in his “Denial of Death” wrote that “the motivating principle of human behaviour is the fear of death. To alleviate this fear, man attributes a supernatural nature to culture: it provides the mechanism for his perpetuation and redemption. This is why man’s aggressiveness is so much greater than that of other animals.”
It has been suggested that faith is nothing but an artificial urge for those without super-consciousness. Can you consciously develop faith, they ask, without higher consciousness? When you are unable to grasp and retain faith, you are said to be in a self-inflicted life sentence in the prison of fear.
Faith and fear come together when life and death situations claim priority. Aron Ralston of Utah cut off his arm to climb out to safety when he was pinned by a boulder in an abyss. Faith and fear can work miracles.
Imagine if faith and fear seeped through Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vuolic as she fell from 33,000 feet after her airliner exploded mid-air in 1972, and cheated death without a parachute?
Some Scriptures say that faith is the evidence of things unseen. Likewise, fear must also qualify to be the evidence of things unseen or un-experienced, yet!
Sculpting faith and harnessing fear have wrought fanatics, atheists, agnostics, deists, animists, mystics and ascetics. The challenge is in finding a balance between being blinded by faith, imprisoned by fear, inspired by rationalism, misled by superstition and misguided by theology.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.
