How much of what you believe did you actually choose?
Hey friend,
The comment section on any social media post tends to be entertaining. Every now and then, it's actually enlightening.
Like this one. I found it under an AI-generated YouTube video that falsely claimed an AI had been trained on Leonardo da Vinci's mirror script and decoded hidden anti-religious messages woven into his painting, The Last Supper (...lol)
"Faith without reason is the sleep of truth. And those who wake shall see what was forbidden."
The video was fake, but finding that comment was worth every minute I wasted watching it. I've been sitting with it since May 2nd and it's made me ask:
Where in my own life am I accepting things as true without ever looking for the reason behind them?
Real quick, let's define both words so the rest of this flows.
Faith: in the broadest sense, is anything you believe without checking. Not just religion. Any idea you inherited and never put to the test.
Reason: is the willingness to ask why. Is this actually true? What is it built on? Does it hold up when you look?
So why does this matter?
A belief you never question never gets tested. After a while you stop seeing it as a belief at all. It stops feeling like something you chose and starts feeling like plain fact. And from there, it steers decisions you don't even realize you're making.
That's the sleep. The truth is still sitting there. You've just stopped looking at it.
And those who wake up, the ones willing to ask the uncomfortable question, "is this actually true?" tend to find the very thing they were told not to look at.
You start seeing it everywhere. At least I have.
In religion.
The traditions that last are the ones strong enough to survive hard questions because a belief you've wrestled with and kept is stronger than one you've accepted without a fight.
Waking up doesn't have to cost you your faith. Plenty of times it deepens it. Forbid hard questions, though, and you can end up on the wrong side of the truth.
400 years ago Galileo pointed a telescope at the sky and saw moons circling Jupiter. The church had already decided the heavens didn't work that way, so they called it heresy and kept him under house arrest until he died.
But he was right.
The thing they banned the people from looking at had been true the whole time, and the simple act of looking is what proved it.
In government.
So much of what we accept gets a free pass for one reason: "that's just how it's done." We follow the policy because it's the policy. But every rule was written by someone, for someone, at some point in time. Asking who it serves, and whether that reason still holds, is just staying awake.
Here's one that's easy to forget: not that long ago a woman in the US couldn't get a credit card in her own name. She needed a husband or a father to cosign for her. That was the rule until 1974.
At the time, they had a reason ready. They said women were a credit risk because they might leave their jobs to raise their kids. It sounded careful enough that almost nobody questioned it. But it didn't hold up. Plenty of women were perfectly creditworthy.
It was control dressed up as prudence. It kept the money, and the power that comes with it, in men's hands. It took enough people waking up to that before it finally changed.
In fitness.
The whole industry runs on unexamined faith.
"Go hard or go home."
"More work, more results."
"You have to earn your rest."
"10 hours a week or don't bother."
"Discipline means never missing."
Most people accept these and never ask the obvious question:
"What's the least amount of work that will get me from where I am now to where I want to be?"
Ask that one honestly and most of those rules don't hold up. That single question is the reason I train and coach the way I do.
Here's what I'll leave you with:
You don't have to tear down everything you believe. Doubting everything is just as lazy as believing everything. Neither one is really awake.
Pick one belief you've never actually questioned. Something you treat as obviously true. And ask why.
If it holds up, good, it's finally yours instead of something you were simply handed.
If it doesn't, you just found something that was forbidden, and you're better off seeing it.
The ones who never ask get certainty. The ones who ask get the truth.
Until next time,
Peter Tangel