True faith is not the falsely motivated exercise of seeking to fill in "good" explanations for those inconsistencies and gaps in knowledge or understanding one encounters in a life of faith. "Good" explanations including admonishments to not question when such explanations are not readily available. True faith is rather the absence of such effort, even of a meditative nature, to seek answers for what, at least in the present, is unanswerable, if in the process we have to demean or otherwise belittle a family member who asks such questions.

To trade in ideas to affirm your faith at the expense of family by attacks to their person for seeking answers to difficult questions is to be one of God's elected who is entrusted with the multiplication of blessings but only seeks to multiply them when it insures a return they seek. But the world as it is can never insure such in its present condition and thus, no growth in spiritual wealth in reality is rendered.

The family member who on receiving such blessings invests it, by planting it and maintaining a vigilance over it, seeking its multiplication, though carefully weeding it. But the cultivator of such blessings does not fail to recognize that the seed does not look like a grown plant and thus can recognize the variety of forms truth takes from seed truth. It takes wisdom to recognize true weeds.

I do not ignore the rebel who seeks the discomfort of the righteous in posing difficult questions merely to mock the faithful. In such situations, absolute faith mocks the rebel who takes joy in such inconsistencies for their self-righteous indulgence.

Yet, absolute faith recognizes as cowardly those who deny such inconsistencies or otherwise seek to subvert those who question by insisting such inconsistencies must serve some greater good.

The rebel seeks destruction of truth by cynicism. The coward by deceit and fear, labeling such effort to harm as noble and faith filled. Both are demons who deny God by denying reality. But if the coward merely seeks to label his brethren rebel as a means to dismiss difficult questions, then the burden falls upon his head to prove rebellion rather than be allowed to cry fire in a crowded theater with no responsibility for such panic as may occur under such circumstances.

True faith, therefore, is a state of tension, a state of cognitive dissonance...it is not a state of false comfort, achieved either by denial or myth building.

It is achieved by few, for it places great demands on those who have it. It brings tension, not peace. It brings questions and few answers. It mocks juvenile needs for security. Finally, it rejects the comfort of false belief as being a wolf in sheep's clothing as false belief seeks to consume inconsistency with its appetite for vulnerability at the sacrifice of integrity.

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