What is blind Faith? Faith is accepting what you are taught or told without trying to prove or disprove it, rather than discovering it through experience. Atheism suggests that those who believe in God have blind faith-and they do. It has not been proven that God exists; similarly, it has not been proven that humans are kind, honest, and good by nature. Young Goodman Brown is a character in "Young Goodman Brown," who leaves his known world in Salem village and travels an unknown road in a dark forest in the middle of the night, a common motif in literature better known as the Hero's journey, and is faced withobstacles. He must decide if he will carry his journey out till the end, or turn back and not learn the truth about himself and other humans. The story "Young Goodman Brown," by Nathaniel Hawthorne traces Young Goodman Brown's experiences, physical and psychological, paralleling the Hero's Journey and showing how he discovers that humans are truly evil by nature; therefore, altering his views of other humans and life itself. In the beginning of the story, Goodman Brown is faced with a decision to stay home with his wife another night or to take off on his journey. This parallels his psychological decision to leave behind all that he knew to be true up until that point and discover the truth no matter how harsh it may be. The call, from the Hero's journey, is when Goodman Brown decides to go out alone to discover himself. Faith, his wife, is urging him to stay with her instead of leaving that night. She almost convinces Brown to stay, but his desire to discover himself overpowers his desire to stay with Faith. The struggle going on inside of Goodman Brown's head is really between remaining innocent and having blind faith in the nature of man or embarking on the journey to discover his true self, no matter what that may be. The threshold, or jumping off point for Brown, is when he has made his final decision to ignore his wife's pleas and take his journey.
