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Whereas Afrocentric spiritual faith has always been the tow rope used by Black Americans for survival, certain of their non-spiritual faiths have gotten them into a world of problems.
Non-spiritual or secular faith is firmly fixed beliefs concerning trust and confidence in oneself, in others, or in things.
Trust is the belief one is leaning on someone solid regarding the moral (doing the right thing) and the ethical (doing the socially acceptable thing properly) actions of another. Confidence is the sense of empowerment from accumulated achievements.
The contents of trust and confidence may be probably true, distorted, fantasy, true up to a point, or true in one situation but not in another. Non-spiritual faith Beliefs are focused throughts, feelings, and/or emotions that seem true but cannot be proved. Regardless of type, faith and beliefs are held together by loyalty rather than by knowledge or reasonableness.
In other words, non-spiritual faith may be good/bad, sound/flawed, realistic/unrealistic, consistent/inconsistence, or appropriate/inappropriate. Secular faith is at its worse when one uses it to believe in evil or when it serves as a mask for spiritual faith.
A clear example of masked spiritual faith hypocrits were the slaveowners who committed daily cruelties on African American slaves in between reading the Bible (see Fredrick Douglass "My Bondage and My Freedom" p. 188, 344). Let us now look at two examples of how non-spiritual faith is inconsistent or wrongly used.
First, recall the self-trust and self-confidence you had when walking on a log. Now if that log was raised off the ground -- 5, 20, or 100 feet -- at what point would fear of walking on the log overwhelm your self-faith? Would your fears be reasonable or unreasonable and why? To know where self-faith ends and fear/anxiety begins is knowledge needed for every significant aspect of your life.
The answer to this question is crucial to determining your success or failure in life. To succeed requires building self-faith as fire walkers do. At first, beginning fire walkers feel pain, get burned, and have a sense of harm. Through self-faith, they gradually transcend ("climb above") mental limitations and enter a new level where pain and burns no longer occur.
A second example points out how non-spiritual faith has encaged struggling Black Americans. The story starts with ancient Africans who had a good character "group spirit" stemming from their Afrocentric spiritual faith. Thus, each member could and would trust and have confidence in fellow villages. Such African tradition fellowship faith was extended to Europeans when they came with friendly appearing evilness to take over Africa and the Africans.
So deeply rooted was this faith in the psyche of the Africans that, when they were brought to the Americas as slaves, many continued applying it to their cruel European captors. The essential point is that slaves with enslaved minds failed to make the conversion from having faith in the good characer qualities and actions of homeland Africans to not having faith in the bad character qualities and actions of the European enslavers.
Thus, despite the vicious lies and labels Europeans spewed on the slaves (e.g. being subhuman, inferior, unintelligent, practitioners of heathen religions, anti-ambitious), the enslaved minded slaves continued to have faith, trust, and confidence in their enemies. As a result, they not only absorbed these bad labels but also learned to make them come true -- as shown by self-defeating behaviors.
This entire "package" of wrongly applied faith has been delivered to several of today's Black Americans and serves as a major obstacle to their progress. It is the duty of those with Afrocentric faith to help those with enslaved minds recognize and then shed trust in racist (or anyone) filled with hate, greed, ignorance, and envy. Simply by removing such "bad faith" will put struggling Blacks on the right road.
Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D
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