“Buddhists, Christians, Islam; nobody knows the truth of God or the truth of Buddha because such a thing does not exist. When you talk about truth, that is already based on what you know. But what you know is originally supposed come from truth, right? So in order to talk about truth you have to know the truth. If you don’t know the truth you can’t talk about it. That is called tautology. You are chasing your own tail.” – Shin, Myo Vong, Cookies of Zen, p 382.
This quote cuts close to what I think of as religion’s “epistemological problem.” And I don’t mean that despectively – I, too, as a practicing faith-based atheist, have the same epistemological problem. Only sincere agnostics (and I am one of those cynics who believes most agnostics are insincere, or, minimally, self-deceptive) can avoid the problem – and they do so only by refusing to play the game. At some point, each believer makes a commitment to some kind of truth. And there is no resolution to the paradox lurking behind the question of where such truth comes from. In fact, perhaps in a slightly Lacanian sense, it is the elision of that paradox that is the definition of faith, although I still prefer the definition of faith I once heard in a lecture by Leonardo Boff: faith is a sort of positive inversion of fear. Cf Kierkegaard?
