Faith

I was out taking a constitutional and for whatever reason my mind wandered onto the topic of religion and faith. It seems that faith is a natural tendancy of all humans, and so I began thinking about how mine manifests. I'm not particularly religious, so I don't place my faith in concepts of gods, goddesses, or mysticism. I've no quarrel with those that do, religion can be a great source of comfort and guidance for people, it's just not for me. Similarly, I wouldn't call myself an athiest. It's an old truism that you can't prove a negative, so belief in the non-existance of God is as much an article of faith as belief in God. I niether believe nor disbelieve, so what does that leave?

It turns out that it leaves people. I choose to place my faith in people. I suppose my article of faith can best be expressed with a quote from Anne Frank:

I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

I tend to believe that the natural tendancy is toward the good. Sure, sometimes, in some people, the good gets buried and they do bad, even evil, things, but that's the exception. If it weren't, wouldn't we have destroyed ourselves long ago?

This outlook probably explains a bit of my fondness for superheroes. The idea that someone given great power will choose to use that power to help others is a tribute to the inherent goodness of humanity. The cynic would assume that a world with superpowers would be a world of super-villains with no heroes to fight them.

So, no, I'm not a cynic. I'll pretend to cynicism for comedic effect at times, but that's because cynicism is just funnier than optimism. Nope, I'm afraid I am in fact a hippy-dippy optimist.