Even the most dyed in the wool skeptic actually lives his life by faith. When he boards a plane, he does not usually check the cockpit to ask for the pilots’ licences. He takes it as read. He will not have checked whether those filling the fuel tanks have in fact filled it with gas and not water. He acts on the belief that they will have put in genuine fuel. But this he has not verified. He takes it on trust.

Married couples believe that their spouses are faithful even though they can’t have checked that that is in fact the case.They don’t normally place them under surveillance. If they did, it would almost certainly spell the end of that relationship. They act on trust; they have faith in each other.

The most secular scientist also operates on the basis of faith, for example, that the world is a universe and not chaos, that it is orderly and predictable, that there is a uniformity about it that enables him to say if water is H20 in NY it must be it will be H20 in Timbuktu; all this without in fact testing that it is indeed so. Life would be virtually impossible otherwise. We all know that we assume we are rational and in a sense can’t prove it. We would end up moving in circles since we would assume the very thing we seek to prove.

Religious faith claims that here is a transcendent reality whose existence is not easy to prove by means of the methods say of natural science because this reality is not susceptible of such proof.

But this Supreme Being is real to those who are open to the actions of the transcendent one who gives them a deep sense of worthiness, that they are precious, that they have a high destiny, that they are created ultimately for eternity, to enjoy a blissful existence in the presence of this divine one, whose nature they…share. They are the finite made for the infinite; they are called to reflect the character of this Supreme One, to be compassionate, gentle and caring, to see other fellow creatures as equally precious.

The Supreme Transcendent One longs for us to live amicably together in harmony with all other creatures, animate and inanimate. No religious faith I know proclaims that violence is right, that it is right to steal, to be cruel, to oppress another…..May all of us people of faith work assiduously for the coming of a time when we will beat our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning hooks and we will know war no more for we are ultimately family.