We do not only believe, we feel the need to share our belief with others. As belief in God entails notions of good and evil and promises of heaven and hell, we become possessed with the desire to turn others into our faith.
From one’s understanding of the nature of the divine stems other explanations to some of the most fundamental questions. We take this set of answers to primordial questions as the Truth. In fact, we equate this Truth with God.
To believe in God is thus to stake a claim on truth. Religion offers the comfort of certainty. We abandon the arduous task of inquiry and leave it to our religion to provide the answers to our deepest questions.
Religion provides the believer with a ready-made world-view and prescription for moral conduct. It gives him or her a sense of direction, a “path to righteousness.” It gives the believer a sense of order as everything seems to fall in place and has meaning in the light of religion.
This makes the believer happy. It is the happiness of certainty. It is the bliss of ignorance. The long struggle through doubt is over. “If you want rest and comfort, then believe,” Friedrich Nietzsche says. “But if you want truth, then inquire.”
The old sages warned that knowledge entails suffering. And for the Buddha, happiness actually began with the recognition and acceptance of this life of suffering. To pursue the truth is to be constantly in the shadow of doubt, to be always tormented by the anxiety of uncertainty of the finitude of the human mind. Only the belief in God can provide final rest to this restlessness, according to St. Augustine.
Thus armed with the logic of religion, the convert now takes the task of evangelization, of converting others to his or her faith. This personal mission is only undertaken in good faith, with the deepest concern for the salvation of others.
The believer takes it as his or her duty to impart the truth, the sole universal truth, the word of God inscribed in the holy texts. There shall be no resistance to this Word, unless one is inspired by the Devil who sows confusion with false narratives.
The believer has to fish for other souls, to make them citizens in the City of God. He or she vows to do everything to get people out of the City of the Devil, to fight the heretics and the infidels who actively oppose God or are worshipping idols. They have to be forced to submit to the only true Church and the only true God.
The believer is willing to wage a holy war against all those who refuse God or oppose the task of evangelization. The Word shall be spread and imposed on all those who insist on their notions of truth. That has to be carried out even if it takes force or violence.
If the goal is to defeat the heretics and the infidels, then it is a just war. Those who die fighting this war are considered martyrs of the faith and are assured of eternal salvation. If they die in battle, their souls go straight to heaven. Generations of faithful shall be taught about their good deeds and they shall be venerated as saints.
Such is the danger of blind faith, one that dismisses the possibilities of other beliefs. The moment we become too sure about what we believe in, we stop asking questions, especially those about our own assumptions. We start to judge others as we fail to see things from their perspective.
We impose our morality and fail to see other notions of good and evil and that things may not be as simple as they seem. We become blind to paradoxes and ambiguities. We become self-righteous. We close our minds as we insist on our sense of logic, the reasoning of our dogma. In doing so, we negate free will. We thus cease to be an image of God.
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