Define faith.

The majority of people will tell you that faith is simply the belief in something that you have no proof of. God, for example: a very popular recipient of said belief. I have never met anyone who could prove that they had, in fact, received incontrovertible evidence of the almighty. Those who had generally lost their belief soon after their encounter. For various reasons.

Being unlinked and able to wander about at will, something that most people are both blessed and cursed not to know much about, I've travelled to many wheres and whens and I've seen much.

The best example of what I think of as faith I found on a world where humanity had managed to kill itself using hand me down alien technology found discarded on the moon in their 1969.

The quark bomb is no doubt one of the nastiest weapons I have seen in all of my wanderings. Among non-biowar offerings, of course.

The quark bomb, when detonated, makes no sound. There is no flash of light. You could be sitting next to one and never know it had gone off. In fact, it takes twelve hours for any damage at all to manifest itself. You see, the quark bomb causes structural damage strictly on the subatomic level. So it's a good half-day before the itching starts and a couple of hours before a victim's skin begins to slough off the body in sheets. Shortly thereafter, the skeletal structure starts to collapse in on itself, and utter lack of corporeality is only moments away.

It looks like a biowar attack at first, like some extremely angry hemorrhagic fever perhaps. But by that time physical structures, such as buildings, at the center of the detonation begin to also deteriorate. Then it can be recognized both what it is and where it was set off. The first usage I ever witnessed of this sort of device was on a different world altogether, and ground zero was Grand Central Station. That device, however, was very crude, and only had a blast radius of thirty miles.

It was much, much later in my own life that I ran across the group I dubbed the Mommonites. As I said, this earth's inhabitants had managed to kill themselves with all manner of things left around the Sea of Tranquility, quark bombs among them.

The Mommonites appeared to be at least a century after this destruction, the descendents of a town in what you might know as the Colorado and they spelled slightly differently: Colorato. I called them Mommonites because "Mommon" was written on the side of the quark bomb they worshipped. It was the name of the corporation who had built the device, apparently and that was thus the name they had given their god.

Their religious services were nothing I hadn't seen the like of before, though repulsive for reasons which I will not describe here. While they were astounded to meet a human being who did not have ash-grey eyes and weeping sores, they were not sufficiently impressed to allow me to disarm their god so that it could quit emitting what were no doubt very low waves of destructive energy. Hence the abundance of ash in the area around Mommon. That was the end result of its worship. It was damaged and going off slowly, taking decades to kill them instead of hours. The idea of having someone, smooth-skinned or no, rooting around in their god's mechanical guts was more then they could bear. So I moved on from there. And left them to disintegrate on their knees.

And that's what always comes to mind when faith is brought up. Not something so simple as implying that every god has a corporation's name on its underbelly or even the tired notion that faith will slowly kill you. No, for me, faith is what keeps you from being saved, either from yourself or your chosen diety or both. It's the idea that we all know what's best for us, even if what's best for us is to leave that idea to others or to some manufactured deity.

But we don't know what we need. We're silly, stupid creatures, all of us. And knowing that I'm no different, in the end, than anyone else–knowing that the most important things in my life are no doubt bombs that I pay homage to–is more horrible than anything I've encountered. On any world.