Why are Putting Your Life in Someone Else’s Hands?

You know who I don’t trust? People who say they don’t trust anyone.

You’d be unable to function if you truly trusted no one. If you didn’t grow ALL of your food yourself, how would you eat? Why do you have faith that whoever processed that gallon of milk in your fridge did it right? Getting in your car and driving somewhere: doesn’t that involve trust not only in the manufacturer of your car but also in anyone else driving on the same streets? Don’t you, at some level, need to believe that anyone else behind a steering wheel knows the rules of the road and will follow them?

If you belong to any religion, you trust whoever came up with the central tenants of that religion and whoever wrote or put together its central texts. If you are a Christian—Catholic or protestant—you trust the early founders of the Roman Catholic Church, who decided which writings would get included in what has become The Holy Bible. If you are a protestant of any stripe, you not only believe those early Catholics, you also believe former Augustinian (Catholic) priest Marin Luther, who removed books from the original Holy Bible. Oh, and you have put your faith into whatever company printed the Bible you read.

If you take sides in local, state, national, or world politics but are not privy to the private meetings among politicians and bureaucrats at those levels, you trust someone: perhaps the politicians themselves, but more likely, any person or organization who purports to know what’s going on, like the producers of newspapers, televised news programs, online content, or—in some cases—anyone with a cell phone who holds it up and pushes the Record button.

If you take a prescription medication, a homeopathic remedy, or see an acupuncturist but do not fully understand how the human body functions, you are trusting someone.

So, it seems to me, that question is not “Who do I trust?” The question is “Why do I trust?”