FAITH: what's the point?

Dauer, I agree. I'm casting very broad nets here, and I expect qualifying corrections such as yours. Thanks.

I'll be away from my computer til later this afternoon. I look forward to the development of this thread. A great question.

Dictionary definitions for "faith:"
1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.
3. Loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance: keeping faith with one's supporters.
4. The body of dogma of a religion: the Muslim faith.
5. A set of principles or beliefs.

In examining the question "Is faith beneficial?" I think we'd need to agree on which definition (above) we are using for faith. Or perhaps there's yet another definition?

Let's look for a moment at definition #3. I can see a benefit there. This is almost part of the social contract. When I drive through an intersection with a green light, I have faith the cars that have the red lights will stop (though my faith in even this is sometimes tenuous). When I get married to my wife, I have faith she will love me into the future. Without these kinds of faith, we couldn't drive a car, get married, etc.

If we're talking about definition #2 above, (and it seems we are), I see some benefit there. Most religions have some message similar to: "Be kind to others."
Fine. But why? Why should I be kind to others, really? Sometimes I just get punished for it. Sometimes it seems like a waste. Still, I take it on faith that it is a good thing to do. Our society benefits from people striving toward this ideal. Some of this striving is based on faith. Because speaking in strictly logical terms, there is no real reason to be kind to others. There is no material evidence that shows there is any reason for us to be kind to others. Yet, if everyone does this on faith, the world becomes a better place to live in. Even if the particular religion I happen to believe in turns out to be false.

To put it another way: Lets say I have faith in a simple Christianity. (We could also use the Eightfold path of Buddhism or 10 commandments, etc. for this example). I devote my life to charity, to helping the poor. (Lets assume I don't get into the darker side of religion like persecution of non-Christians, etc.) So I live out my life like that, and die. Then it turns out that Christianity was all wrong...it wasn't true, whatever. Because of my faith, I still ended up helping others a lot. The faith, even though ultimately possibly misguided, still led me to live a valuable life where I helped others. This is an area in which I see faith to be beneficial, even if it turns out to be a bit misguided. Contrast this to someone who has no faith in anything. They spend their entire life contemplating the nature of the universe, critique every belief system, and end up doing nothing for nobody, because of their lack of faith in anything (hey, thats me if I'm not careful--I better get off my rear).

Extension question: Take someone who has no faith in anything, so they go around critiquing and analyzing everything their entire life. They learn an extreme amount. Yet they end up not really contributing much to society. Take another person who pretty much "takes things on faith," and "freed" in a way by this faith, spends their entire life helping others. Yet the religion they had faith in ended up to be ultimately false. In this case, was that faith still beneficial? Opinion?

And maybe yet another sneaky benefit of faith: It keeps a few whackos from becoming sociopathic murderers, etc., due to fear of punishment by some god. This is debatable, though: perhaps it creates as many psychos as it deters.

In my opinion (which is all self-constructed morality is, in my opinion), a variable portion of one's life should be used in each; society-enriching and self-enriching.

Personally, it depends kinda on my mood which I pursue...it's usually the latter, due to my varying degree of disdain for human beings.

However, there are many obvious examples of either extreme (or any mix of the two) being morally or logically "incorrect". This quandry here is very much based in where, and to what, the individual assigns value.

Is all morality self-constructed? Each of us decides for ourselves what is "moral"? I think not. Morality, it seems to me, is that set of values accepted by a social group. Morality is rooted in the historical and cultural past of the social group, though it may evolve as conditions change. If a Puritan was stranded alone on an island, I would expect that his fundamental values would remain pretty much unchanged, though he might adapt to the conditions. If one were raised with a taboo against eating coconuts, and that's all there were the taboo might be set-aside. heterosexual prisoners, we are told, are pretty non-judgemental about homosexual acts inside the walls. Taboos against cannibalism did not deter Mr. Packer, but after the crisis he reportedly never ate another human.

Fashion must also play a role in determining what is "moral, or immoral". During the 1950's it was regarded as immoral to talk about sex even in a round-about manner. In the Sixties there was a return to Free Love, but that sort'a petered out when STD became rampant. Television has taken homosexuality out of the closet and less shameful than it ever was before in our culture.

Now some individuals do "decide for themselves" what they regard as "moral", or "acceptable" thoughts, words and behavior. A puritan might decide that it was alright to wear jewelry, go dancing, and fall into affair with a local minister. The consequences of the Scarlet Letter were social, and even the individual will wrestle with guilt for her defiance of convention for the rest of her life. Consequences and convention are the two handmaidens for what any group labels "moral".

Ash is correct to ground morality in society. But this principle is less problematically applied to traditional societies wherein moral "fashions" change at imperceptible speeds and where there is a homogeneity in moral understandings. In modern societies we see a greater rate of change and a degree of pluralism providing individuals with moral choices. This might be the basis for The Reverend's impression that his moral views are HIS constructions. They may be more often than not recognized constructions of society, or of subgroups within his society. His sense of moral freedom may stem from his ability to choose from the smorgasborg of codes within his plural society. I am presuming a lot, I know. But I think that in general:
Ethics is where we more readily construct our own behavioral rules. Morality is where our behavioral rules are more likely to be constructed for us by our predecessors.

FAITH: What's the point.

Simple, no point at all.

Secondly, what the word faith actually means? Nothing! Exactly! It's definition It's nothing but a bunch of abstract words, that actually don't mean absolutly nothing.

"Faith" is the insistance that a guess about something unknown...is correct...despite the fact that there is almost no evidence that it is...and such evidence as exists is ambiguous.

Gosh, Frank, you've changed so much in your time away...

<hee hee>

Frank- HI! Glad to see you back!

"Faith" is knowing that Frank would indeed be back. "Faith" is also knowing that as funny as it is to everyone, a good fart isn't always welcome in a Philosophy thread.

It was the devilled eggs, I swear.

Bo Go Wo & Asherman:
Both of you I agree with ...........but I am not sure that you both agree with each other....please correct me if I
am wrong . (A is equal to B , and B is equal to C, but A is not necessarily exactly equal to C ).
I don't think Asherman dismisses Faith with the same completeness as does BoGoWo........in point of fact.
Is it the "intuition" dimension that is present so strongly in one, and rarely harboured by the other ?

My faith is that Frank would not lose his faith.
GREAT to have you back Frank. We need your passion and clarity.

Good to see ya, JL.

I'll do my best with the "passion"...and hope that it doesn't cloud the "clarity."

Welcome back Frank!

I see you are pretty correct in your summation - faith takes you where logic can't (yet or ever) readily go.

The flip side of the coin is you can never prove or disprove true faith. Remember the Monthy Python sketch "sex is better than logic but you can't prove it, it just is"

Great discussion here. In the context of the current discussion, "faith" is belief in the unseen and in what is unsupportable by science or logic.

It was pointed out that we all have faith in what will happen in the next moment or day, whether it is that the sun will rise or that our car will start (because it has always started.) This is not faith in the sense of this discussion. This is the faith of ordinary life, without which we could not get out of bed because the floor might not be under our foot as we step out.

The "leap of faith" that we read about is what happens when a hopeful believer is not discouraged by lack of scientific or documentable proof underlying a dogma or system of belief. I know many people who tell me that they believe but do not know why they believe. When you want something enough, you can make it happen. You want to believe, say, that there is an afterlife because life does not make sense to you, otherwise. So you posit a world after death and adhere to that belief because you find it unthinkable to consider a world otherly organized.

Surely, faith was a tool used by rulers to keep their subjects calm and subservient and accepting of their fate. "You will live in paradise after you leave this hard world." Peasants, slaves, the dirt-poor... must have said this to themselves, (and say it to this day,) over and over again, as they tolerated the live of a serf and awaited glory.

It is frightening not to believe, not to make a leap of faith, to accept completely that we go around only once. How do we explain those people, those millions of good and worthy people, who are swept away by cyclones in Japan or landslides in Central America? Babies, children, little starter people, lost to the world as if they had never lived their short lives. Why were they born? Does the overarching view of any religion explain this completely? I have never found a satisfactory answer to that in any creed or dogma except for those that espouse reincarnation or rebirth, an idea that handily covers early and untimely death and also explains evil (karma) in an interesting way.

There are indentations in the earth near a lake below my cottage in Ireland. The locals tell you that the unbaptised children are buried there; they could not be buried in a proper cemetary. I look down on this site and wonder about their short lives and unconsecrated deaths. But I look at it only with the thought of what sadness must have accompanied the loss of these babies. I myself think we go around once. I am prepared to entertain other ideas and enjoy pondering the spirit-source that surely does not die with our bodies because that energy must return to something. But is it differentiated or individualized or personal in any way? Now that would take a leap of faith for sure.

Kara, I guess we could define two kinds of faith: that which is reasonable, like the assumption that the sun will rise tomorrow, and the unreasonable assumption that there is an eternal reward or punishment for the beliefs that we hold.
One of my faiths is that babies that died in landslides or the school in Russia are without any problem whatsoever. Death is the solution to all problems. No person, no problems (believe it or not, Stalin said that). The ones I feel for are the survivors, like the children's parents. But it is not impossible for them to overcome their suffering.

If that there exists a material world independent of observations is faith based then so is your (mine and everyone's) body, or sensations as body. So who or what holds this faith? If faith is a collection of thoughts (and feelings) those thoughts cannot also be that which holds the thoughts.

So it appears we have faith but no holder of faith.

The primary belief is that there is someone to believe (or to not believe) and once that is dropped, by paradoxically no-one, then perhaps all beliefs dissolve and truth is revealed as having always been present.






Oh, Hi Frank Apisa, good to see your still kicking……....and here.

Re: FAITH: what's the point?


Others have so gracefully and succinctly described definitions of faith and its value so I am sure I am restating what others have already stated.

Faith outside of the definition as its own construct and part of human consciousness does have value. It does serve a purpose. Faith is hope. Faith is the will to believe in something that you are not sure of. A hope that what you believe in will be true. To have faith implies that not only do you want to believe in something but more so that some day you will know if your faith was true or not. You don't have faith in something that you don't think you will know the answer to someday.

So the value in faith is that it gives you the inner strength to get by until that which you have faith in is realized. The value in faith is that you can find harmony and peace where you would otherwise have worry and fear. Gala nailed it right on the head early on in the thread, stating that faith is the waiting with hope to control worry.

What I wonder is can a person exist without faith? Can you not have faith and be alive? Obviously I am referring to those who possess cognitive abilities and not those unable to think or comprehend. Does not have to be faith in religion or faith in God, but just faith in general. Is faith an integral part of intelligent life or can someone exist and not have any faith in something ?

nipok, you are correct that life without faith in a personal god or belief in an afterlife is more lonely and less comforting than one with those back-ups. What is hope but denial? When you hope in the face of all evidence to the contrary, you are hiding from your inescapable conclusions by denying them. If one needs to believe in a god who will dispense ultimate justice, according to whatever we see as justice, then that person must frame his life view with those concepts and not look at any of the picture that is outside the frame. He can do this by positing first principles that are "self-evident" and do not need proving. "There is a god" is one such first principle. (Alan Watts wrote once that Zen meditation consisted of removing the frame through which you look at the world.)

The myths that have shaped and continue to shape world views were formed in the earliest days of human existence, created to explain what man looked at and could not understand. We have to make sense of things but we must also deal with our fears, and isn't our worst fear that of dying, of being snuffed out, of simply not existing anymore? Thus religions needed to explain the world by incorporating a life beyond this one, not only because most people endure sad, hard, and desperate lives and are helped to get through the days by the hope of another existence; but because there is little justice in this world and we crave a further one where good will be rewarded and evil will be punished (or at least not rewarded.)

To digress only a little, there is an interesting piece on the op-ed page of the NYTimes today about dualism. I will patch it in here if anyone is interested. I cannot do a link because the NYTimes is password-protected.