Let Faith Belong to Faith, and Reason to Reason

Every faith carries a groan.

—from Bei Dao, "All Things"

Lately there have been many scandals in religious circles—Catholicism, Buddhism; the United States, China, South Korea—none is exempt.

First, I wish to express deep sympathy to the innocent people harmed in these scandals. I hope those of you who survive can soon leave the shadow behind and be happy again; I pray that those who have passed may rest in peace.

As a medically trained person with no religious faith, yet one who must often deal with the dying, I know full well that religious faith—and indeed other kinds of faith—has its reason to exist, and that this reason is a weighty one.

Religious faith will not vanish from human society because of any single sensational scandal. At least in the foreseeable future, religious faith will remain widespread.

Because everyone must face birth, aging, illness, and death, and will encounter things that all humanity is helpless against.

Take those terminal cancer patients for whom cure is no longer possible. They are terrified before death, and religious faith can sometimes help some of them overcome that fear and help them through the last stretch of their lives.

Then there are those who carry immense pain in their hearts with nowhere to release it; their souls too need a refuge. Some find a refuge in religious faith, and in it attain peace and happiness.

I myself do not need religious faith to have peace of mind. As Darwin said on his deathbed, he did not need to believe in God's existence to have already overcome the fear of death.

But Darwin is only Darwin, and I am only myself; many people still need religious faith to set their hearts at rest.

I may be annoyed by certain religious believers who, to persuade me to take up their faith, keep chattering away in front of me. But even toward such people I feel great understanding.

At a certain stage after one has acquired religious faith, a person easily becomes carried away by his own religious experience, and spares no effort to hope that others will believe as he does. This is human nature, one of the most normal of human behaviors.

As a member of imperfect humanity, I too have many behaviors that discomfort others; I am in no position to nitpick at others.

Even the perpetrators in these religious scandals have a side worthy of sympathy. They have broken the law and should be punished; that is their just deserts. But some of them are now suffering online harassment on a catastrophic scale as well.

Years ago I myself wrote pieces criticizing people now caught in the whirlpool of public opinion. But when their scandals came to light, knowing they were inevitably going to suffer the double penalty of the law and online mobbing, I at once deleted my old writings from public forums. At most I occasionally mention them in my own social circle and in my tiny-readership blog, to wake up some of my friends who are stubbornly deluded.

The reason I do this is that I do not want to be drawn into this carnival of collective denunciation. As early as over ten years ago, I took part in several episodes of online violence; in those events many people suffered terribly and have never, to this day, walked out of the shadow.

In the recent wave of religious scandals, the innocent religious believers caught in it are especially pitiable. They believe in religion; there must be reasons why they believe. As Bei Dao says, every faith carries a groan.

Whether because of the influence or shocks of their family of origin, or because of the various misfortunes they have met in life, or simply by innate nature, they need a spiritual waystation like religion.

What exists is reasonable. From a humanitarian standpoint, everyone's religious faith is both their freedom and, of necessity, has a reasonable side; others have no right to carp about it.

There are also some people whose faith is so devout that, even after a religious scandal breaks, they still cannot accept reality and insist the so-called scandal is a defamation. To onlookers such people seem plainly stubbornly deluded.

One need only think of how one feels after a breakup, or how, for a while after a close loved one dies, we cannot pull ourselves out of the pain and cannot accept the facts, to understand these people's psychology.

Help them as much as we can, if they need help, rather than attacking them. If they do not need help, leave them be; time will change everything, and will heal the hearts they wounded through faith.

As an atheist, I once attacked theism. But one day an elderly patient said to me, almost pleadingly: "You have a certain influence among many cancer patients. Could you, from now on, please not deny theism? Doctors can't cure my illness and tell me I don't have much time left. Without this spiritual anchor of faith, I really don't know how I would get through."

Her words made me deeply ashamed. A few years later, my own mother was dying. Before she passed she was utterly serene, carefully preparing her own burial clothes and coffin, as if death were as festive an occasion as a wedding. Looking at those burial clothes and coffin (in my hometown we do not call it coffin, but "long-life wood" or "long-life boards"), though she knew her time was short, she was not afraid; she even smiled and asked my eldest aunt whether her long-life boards were good.

She was a theist, a rural woman who could not read a single character; she could not even clearly say what exactly she believed. Every year on the first day of the Lunar New Year she would go to the clan ancestral hall to burn incense; in our clan hall we enshrine Zhou Yu of the Three Kingdoms period. Our village is a clan-settled village, and the villagers believe themselves to be descendants of Zhou Yu.

On festivals she would also go to a nearby temple to burn incense and worship the Buddha. Near us there is a temple called the Medicine King Temple, a very interesting temple that enshrines both the Medicine King Sun Simiao and the Buddha. The temple keeper is sometimes a local villager, sometimes one or two monks who have come from nowhere.

So what was her faith? She herself could not say, and neither can I. Rural people where I come from basically have faiths much like my mother's; their faith is pluralistic, not monolithic.

Because of these beliefs, they do not think death is a final going-away; they will still enjoy sacrifices in their ancestral tombs, and will be reborn into this world again. So the end of this life is no great matter; they even hope to reunite with their loved ones in the next life.

Confucius said: "Sacrifice as if the spirits were present; sacrifice to the gods as if the gods were present." Faith is a very idealistic thing. We country folk often say: if you believe, it exists; if you do not, it does not. Its meaning is much the same as Confucius': faith comes from within the human heart. Whether the god one believes in truly exists or not is, in fact, not the important thing.

Those who have faith have their fear of life and death greatly diminished by it. So faith is by no means without effect. As an effective means of spiritual relief, the role of faith is irreplaceable.

There are often terminal cancer patients in excruciating pain on whom all Chinese and Western analgesic measures have failed; at such times only faith can make their hearts feel a little better. I actually advocate euthanasia for them, but Chinese law does not permit it.

Even a very devout religious believer has his own reason; I rarely see a religious believer who, when ill, does not seek a doctor.

There are indeed a very few religious believers who do not seek doctors, and their reasons for refusing are complex: some may relate to having repeatedly sought treatment in the past without effect; some are limited by economic circumstances; and a few patients, out of their own faith, give up seeking medical care.

Which treatment plan a patient chooses is closely bound up with his family, economic situation, social standing, educational background, and personal faith; the doctor does not have the final say.

A while back there was a cancer patient who insisted on trying all sorts of folk remedies, because chemotherapy and Chinese medicine could not stop the progress of her disease. While trying folk remedies she consulted me, and I acquiesced in her trying. Because I already knew that neither I nor the Western doctors had anything very good left to offer her.

She took toad skin on her own and developed severe side effects, her condition progressed, and she came back to ask me what to do. In the past, faced with this situation, I might have stood aside to avoid being implicated if something went wrong, or criticized the patient for being so foolish. But after all these years of experience, I feel deep sympathy for patients like her. Since she was a patient I had treated before and I know her situation, I still did my best to guide her through her problem, though it might not succeed.

For terminally ill patients who have reached the final stage, a folk remedy is also a kind of faith, a kind of hope. They long so desperately to live; since they want to try it, who is in a position to oppose?

Sometimes we can help patients overcome death; sometimes we can only help them overcome the fear of death, accompanying them along the final, exceptionally difficult leg of life. From the standpoint of hospice care, religious faith helps them no less than a doctor does.

I have seen many people who, without any faith at all, are still able to face death calmly. Many of the patients I treat have no faith, yet have come to take life and death lightly and pass away without much suffering.

My father-in-law was a typical example. Near his death I was at his side; knowing the situation was beyond hope, I personally pulled out the various tubes inserted in him, and sent the old man gently through the last stage of life. He passed away with a smile; he is the most gracefully departed person I have ever seen.

In my twenty-plus years of contact with him, I knew full well he had no faith at all, a thoroughgoing atheist; it was just that his nature was broad-minded, and he had long since put life and death out of mind.

But not everyone has such a strong inner core. Those with a strong inner core who fear no threat from the god of death are blessed. Whether that strong inner core comes from their character, their insight, or their faith, being able to rise above life and death is a happy thing.

Besides life and death, there are many other problems that require inner strength. Some people are crushed in spirit; that they are crushed must have its reasons. Onlookers who have not endured the suffering they endured have no right to mock their weakness. If religious faith can make them relatively more at ease, why blame their faith?

When I was in high school, my teacher told me that, given my character and aptitude, I was suited in future to speculative research work. Now I have indeed become just as he said. But thinking back on my classmates, many of them were not suited to a life of rational speculation.

Mr. Russell said the world is beautiful because it is multiform. I love reason and delight in speculation. But I am unwilling to force everyone in the world to be like me and venerate reason. If they wish to live a life of faith, I believe that is their inalienable right, and I am also convinced that, for them, a life of faith is the more suitable one.

I hope that, in moments of carnival-style public-opinion bombardment, we keep a softer spot in our hearts, leave some room for those who are different from us, and do not hurt them. We want to live; we must let others live too.

I remember that a few years ago a shooting rampage occurred at an American university, killing and wounding many; the gunman also died in the shooting. At the memorial service, as everyone lit a candle for the innocent victims, they also lit a candle for the gunman.

Many prayed for the gunman like this: Because we lacked care and love for you, and neglected your suffering, leading you onto an antisocial path, we feel deeply guilty; may you rest in peace.

True humanitarianism ought to be just like that.