You've got to believe something. This is an untouchable truth. Every single living being, not just humans, believes in something. We cannot avoid this, no matter how we try.
We're making decisions every day that draw from our own faith account, whether we'd call it that or not. As a matter of fact, to say "I don't believe anything, I just rely on logic" is itself a belief. You believe that logic supersedes faith. Like I said: untouchable.
Our entire lives are spent building up and replenishing a kind of faith account, making calculated judgments, decisions, and, more often than not, all-out guesses about where to deposit that faith.
It's a funny thing, faith. It can never quite stand still. Like water, it has to constantly flow into or out of something, or it stagnates and vanishes, only to be replaced by a new pool of faith forming somewhere else.
Faith Built on Faith
So if we have to believe something, how do we decide what's worth believing in? This is where logic and reason are supposed to come in, we hope. For many of us, our faith repository is shaped almost entirely by our environment and culture. Being born into a certain place, family, or background weighs heavily on what we end up valuing and wanting, often before we ever get a real say in it.
I value certain things because that's what my father valued, and his father before him. How do I actually know whether spending my time and energy a certain way is right for me? For that matter, how do I know what I truly need, even? It comes down to where, and more importantly, in whom, I put my faith.
And we rarely think about it. I don't wander into work each morning questioning why I should bother making money. I know how important it is because I was taught so for as long as I can remember. So my faith is built on more faith, a kind of inherited scaffolding. Some philosophers call this a categorical truth: the holy grail of the individual. It's the category beneath all the other categories we count on to build the construct we call our life. A faith in a truth about what the world is, and who we are inside of it.
For most of us, this commitment was branded in before we could really think for ourselves. The work, then, isn't necessarily to escape having faith. That's not on the table. It's to finally take a real look at where it's been placed, and ask, with open eyes, whether it deserves to stay there.