been thinking about the relationship of faith and emotion lately. i started thinking about emotion again after having this slightly unsettling experience last year where my subconscious gut emotional faculties seemed to be much more aware than my supposedly rational thinking faculties.

emotional responses are a kind of sixth sense, a necessary component for navigating the world and society, as useful as vision, hearing, etc. it seems to me that the way devout people describe the central role faith plays in their daily lives is not unlike the effect of emotion as i describe it.

i think on one hand faith itself might be a sort of emotion like fear, passion, anger, jealousy, etc but on the other it describes the very state of acceptance or belief in that which we feel. we don’t question whether the feeling exists or not, or from where it sprung, we believe in it, we experience it, we know that it is real, that it exists, that it represents something honest and true.

our conscious mind will do the followup work and churn away at what this emotion means as far as future action, but comparatively, that’s tedium, fill-in-the-blank kind of work. the truly amazing thing is that some intuitive/instinctual/evolutionarily-honed part of us *felt* something way way before the conscious mind had even an inkling of an iota of a figment of what was coming.