Faith
Lord Omar and I have exchanged quite a bit of mail on various subjects, and at one point he made the observation (albeit a bit sarcastically; he was discussing Saint Augustine at the time) that ``With sufficient faith, you see, anything is possible.'' Well, I started writing a response with the sentence ``Truly, with Faith are all things possible...,'' with no idea at all where I was going to go with it. As usually happens at times when I free my mind to the teachings of Chaos, Eris instructed me. Following is an (ever-so-slightly-edited) excerpt from the letter I sent to Lord Omar.

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Lord Omar,
      Truly, with Faith are all things possible -- it allows me, for example, to believe that your Doktorin is the Absolute Truth despite the fact that I know there's no such thing, and that spawned the Philosophical Dilemma that has roosted in your metaphysical cuckoo clock (I guess that makes me a Philosophical Dilemmer, huh?).
      Faith has come to be greatly misunderstood over the millennia, and it's about time that someone set the record straight. Faith is an absolute, unreasoning belief in something. My belief in the absolute truth of your Doktorin is one example, but, more interestingly, so is the belief in an omnipotent being.
      Such a being could do, literally, anything. Make a rock so big he couldn't lift it, and then go ahead and lift it and not lift it simultaneously. No problem. Now, no one could possibly believe that you could lift and not lift something at the same time, especially if it's so big that you can't lift it in the first place. That doesn't phase a Christian, though. He knows that a belief in omnipotence results in logical contradictions, but that doesn't shake his belief that god is omnipotent. To believe something that you know to be impossible -- that is Faith, in its original, unpolluted and completely absurd form. This, like all happy insanities, is a gift from the Lady of Discord and forms the heart of all the Discordian-inspired religions of the world.
      The problem that cropped up is, yet again, due to the influence of the Stinky Finger of Thud, known as ``Reason'' to those who are amenable to it (I'd blame Greyface by name, but you seem to get flustered when I do that, so I won't, even though we both know that it's his fault for trying to impose Order on belief). If you go and tell a Christian that he's completely lacking in common sense by believing that ``omnipotent being'' balderdash (complimenting him on his abundance of Faith, obviously), he'll get all sorts of cheesed off at you and tell you at length how you're going to burn in Hell and what sorts of orifices the demons are likely to stick hot pokers in (which just goes to show you the kind of imagination a person can get if you tell him that almost every use of imagination he can come up with will land him in hot water. He piles tons of shit on his imagination to try to hold it down, you see. Unfortunately for him, imagination pumps taboos like Arnold Schwarzenegger [there's one that I wish was in the spelling checker] pumps iron and eventually gets very strong and very ill-tempered [due to all the metaphysical testosterone]). This lack of joy in the face of his own absurdity serves to distance him from the happy anarchy of Eris and becomes a blecht (like a blight, only yuckier) upon the land.
      This, then, is why Discordians distinguish our True Faith from its corrupted form by calling it, in proper Erisian fashion, ``No Faith.''

      May the Madness always find you,

      --Al
      Episkopos Aloysius Thudthwacker,
      Keeper of the Truth,
      Grander Ballyhoo of Egypt (rip off my tag line, will ya),
      Philosophical Dilemmer,
      Crypt Five Kicker (``Wake up, Thornley!''),
      and All-Around Wacky-Toon