Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa God

I have yet to meet a person with deep faith who isn't smug. It baffles me. Striving to be Christlike or to closely follow the teachings of the Prophet or to deeply understand the Torah...results in smugness? I don't get the connection.

Here's a test: Say "There is no God" to a person of deep faith. The response invariably will be a beatific smile and a patient, condescending expression. The person will say something like "But the evidence is all around you." If you respond with "But the evidence all around us generally points away from the existence of God rather than toward it" and try to back it up with a few details from astronomy, geology or quantum physics, the believer will simply become more serene and patient. Press the issue with a lot of details from science and introduce some logical reasoning, and the believer simply pities you, his or her expression reading You poor dummy. The evidence is all around you but you're too dumb to see it. I'm smart enough to have found God. I could help you find Him, but you're too dumb to let me.

Smug.

I imagine exchanges like that occurred numerous times between fans and the evangelical volunteers at the Super Bowl on Sunday.

But it would seem more credible to me if deep faith produced humbleness rather than gentle arrogance. And honest appraisal instead of serene confidence. Any intelligent person should be able to accept that faith is "faith" precisely because its tenets can't be proven. Smugly asserting that every belief has already been proven doesn't seem realistic.

My suspicion is that people have a deep need for the identity that a faith provides. It's not what the faith teaches, it's who the faith allows the believer to be. People belong to a religion because the belonging is important to them, not because there is a compelling logic to the beliefs. If they were to discard that "membership," they would feel like orphans with no identity, no connections to anyone else.

I recently learned about Julia Sweeney's one-woman show, Letting Go of God, at the Hudson Backstage Theater in Los Angeles. At first I thought it was impossible that there was a show about atheism/agnosticism and that the title must refer to not holding onto God so tightly but taking steps on one's own while God hovers nearby. But after reading about it on the website, I see that it really does mean no longer believing in God. In the following quote from a review, the last sentence, "It's because I take you so seriously that I can't bring myself to believe in you," really resonates with me.

Kendt noted that "the humbly sage Sweeney has needling questions that can't be swatted away... While she scores some easy, flawlessly deadpan laughs at the expense of Mormonism, Deepak Chopra, astrology and Catholicism, the tradition she says she was happily raised in, she is after much bigger game than cheap disdain. As she says to an imaginary God she's at last parting with near show's end: 'It's because I take you so seriously that I can't bring myself to believe in you.'"

That is it exactly. If the devout Christian, Muslim, Jew were to take his faith absolutely seriously, gentle arrogance and serene confidence would not be the result.