response to jansen's letter to christian gf

Issue:
Yesterday a friend of mine wrote a FB note entitled letter to a christian girlfriend.

Brief bg:
The two of them had recently broken up, to my knowledge with her citing religion as the reason. As we all know, "when a heart breaks it don't break even" - feelings of hurt, disappointment, sorrow, abandonment and anguish are disproportionately distributed when a relationship crumbles. In this case, my friend the letter writer received the brunt of the blow.

His case:
In his letter my friend essentially launched an argument against the logic of religion. He brought up his personal experience of a reason-driven life, questions about god as the ultimate creator, the myriad of beliefs that all claim to be the one true religion, practical / technical improbabilities of historical religious events, conflicting interpretations and supposed contradictions in religion, and predictably ending off with one of the most common arguments against religion, that is "if god is good then why's the world so damn bad".

My response:
His queries and concerns are all fine and good. But they still do not, and no matter the amount and extent of reasoning it never ever will, show that religion is bogus. Neither will reasoning ever lead him (or any others who try) to knowing about religion. This is true despite the level of detail, rigour or expertise put into the process of reasoning for the purpose of deciphering the essence of religion.

Why?
Imagine you have a bowl of cream, and you're looking for a grain of rice. You try using all sorts of equipment to help you retrieve the grain of rice from the bowl of cream; you may use a spoon, then advance to a higher level of rigour and expertise by utilizing a high tech piece of equipment built with technical specifications meant precisely to help you retrieve the grain of rice from wherever in the bowl of cream it sits. Yet, you will never ever find the grain of rice no matter how much scooping, handling or advanced systematic searching is conducted within the bowl of cream, if the grain of rice lies outside of this bowl.

The heart of religion is faith, and faith exists beyond the boundaries of reasoning. Let faith be the grain of rice being searched for, let the bowl of cream be the arena within which reasoning and logic exist, let the tools and methods used to retrieve the grain be the process of reasoning. Reasoning is not the route to faith. The thing about faith is you can only know about it by having it. Trying to describe / explain what faith is to someone who does not have it is like trying to explain what color is to a person who does not have sight. Try it. You will never ever succeed; even if you have all the prowess of explanations and conveying knowledge there is, you will never ever be able to explain to a blind person what color is. The concept of color, like faith, is so basic that there are no explanatory routes to attaining knowledge of it. Only if you have it can you understand what it is. And the thing is that to the people who have it, that is people who believe, faith is so very very real that the idea that it does not exist is inconceivable. If I raised to you the possibility that in fact, color does not exist, wouldn't you insist on its existence? Yet to the blind person color is a concept to which he has zero familiarity or knowledge with.

Because they exist on different planes, believers and non-believers trying to reach some kind of "truce" is impossible; it's kind of like chicken and duck trying to have a conversation. Non-believers endlessly scream and shout for god's existence to be proven. What they fail to grasp is that believing in god lies precisely in the faith that he exists without requiring proof that he does. It's in being able to have the most valuable and important relationship of your life knowing that while he is present in every part of it, his existence shall not be 'proven' as defined along lines of reasoning. That is the whole point of faith.