How and why does faith so often fade away? Where does it go, and what do you hold on to when it is gone? Between the believer and the unbeliever lies a sort of communicational voida cultural gapusually marked by silence or, alternatively, by rage. This extended essay draws on history, literature, and theology as well as personal experience in an attempt to give some kind of account of the demise of belief in terms that a believer can perhaps understand and, in the process, to cover some of the principal reasons why the arguments usually put forward to buttress faith prove to be without force. In the end, faith can enrich a persons life only at the expense of the illusions on which it is based.
