Faith is a powerful human force, always at work even without the awareness of its agents. Like reason or creativity, faith is a human quality that shapes the behaviour of individuals and of societies.
In the western world, faith is commonly regarded as irrational, and discarded altogether from social or psychological discourse. Canadian philosopher and humanist John Ralston Saul, in his social critique entitled On Equilibrium, argues that democratic society must progress by balancing the essential human qualities or forces, to reach global justice with individual freedom. The qualities that he cites are: common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason. He argues that reason has been the predominant quality in the West, leading to the tyranny of that trait at the expense of loss of balance with other qualities. A humanist message indeed.
