So who saw that stuff about the US Jesus Camps on TV?

To some they're an essential act of self preservation to save both the kids' souls and the world at large from the spectre of global evil.

To others they're centres for brainwashing the next generation of Americans into a creed of needless yet endless religious warfare and, I might add, shit scary for it.

Now things like these seem to produce a fairly uniform reflex response among the secular, myself included. Basically we screw up our faces and wonder how anyone can get sucked into such mentalness.

Belief, both blind and absolute that what you're doing is the will of an invisible, omnipotent being rather than just a lot of noise. It just seems so irritatingly irrational, this faith, so backward and counter productive that we begin to resent the tolerance pride ourselves on.

Nope, we're sensible thanks very much. We believe in what we can prove, we trust reason and logic, we can see that faith just leads to madness and the bloodshed innocents.

Paradoxically however by rejecting religious faith in this way we are in fact falling into the very heart of the scam that organised religion has been playing with sickening success for millennia.

Religion has been by far the most effective technique of social control, (overall so far anyway,) by convincing people that they have a monopoly on spirituality. Could it be then, that the faith that seems to ludicrous when displayed as above can take other forms?

When I was diagnosed with depression I had two options, meds and / or counselling. Feeling strongly averse to the idea of meds, (I'm not a big fan of legal drugs,) counselling was my only option.

Having regularly poured my mind out onto paper for as long as I can remember I didn't really see how this slightly different method of release could help but I couldn't find any real reasons no to give it a try.

My grandfather's death was one of the issues I addressed during my first course of counselling and though I put it off at first. my counsellor at the time did convince me to really talk about it eventually.

Although I could not see how telling her the things I'd been saying to myself for so long would make the slightest difference to how I felt I found that, thanks to the relationship we had built up, I believed her when I she said it would.

This faith, (ie. belief without proof,) allowed me to relate all the feelings I had, and I mean all of them, even the deepest and darkest, the ones I really didn't want to look at.

Don't ask me how, but it did make a difference. I haven't forgotten my grandfather, and his death still saddens me greatly, but through this process I made my peace with it.

I don't understand it, but it works and I was rewarded for my faith.

Maybe my faith here wasn't in what my counsellor said, ie. something non physical, but rather in my counsellor herself.

This being the case I guess it could be argued that faith in another person is fundamentally different from faith in an unseen intelligence.

Can we draw a line then, between faith in things we can see and faith in things we can't?

Are we actually secure in our smugness, safe in the knowledge that we really are different from them?

I don't think so.

The third and final angle on faith here is well illustrated by something I was discussing last night at a reunion of the bookshop used to work, (easy guys ;) you all rock by the way.)

At one point during the course of the evening we were discussing the birth of human culture, ie. the transition from hunter gatherers to farmers.

A significant factor in this switch, for me anyway, was the shift from relying on the purely physical and immediate to feed yourself and your kids, to trusting long term forward planning and abstract thought.

In the past I've suggested that both sides of this split are still present today and manifests themselves as the classic left / right political split, ie. belief in understanding vs belief in action.

Regardless of political alignment however, don't we all have faith in invisible, all conquering ideas? Democracy, technology, the endless potential of mankind, we each belief in and worship our own gods so, in the end, how different are we to those babbling nut jobs we mentioned at the start?

We're not, is the simple answer and, again, to believe that we are is actually just to reinforce their delusion. They see themselves as being special and different because of their particular flavour of faith.

Obviously it's uncomfortable for us to feel akin to followers of carnage and domination but sparing ourselves such discomfort serves only to strengthen their hand.

I was writing about drugs the other day, (the good kind,) and likening them, and something else I can't remember and am too lazy to look up, to fire. The same analogy can be applied here.

Fire can be incredibly destructive but we don't sit cold in the dark eating raw meat do we? No, we learn how to use it for the best.

Faith can be infinitely more destructive than mere combustion, but also has equivalent potential for positive use.

So I say keep the leap and don't let the psychos put you off.