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Wed 23 May, 2007 02:27 pm
How do you distinguish what you're faithful about and vice-versa?
So many actions in everyone's life are clearly based on faith - yet many denounce the concept of faith when it comes to believing in God, creation, etc.
Is there a criteria used to decide when you choose to believe in faith and when you do not?
BD1
Experiential evidence is a major component which distinguishes rational faith from blind faith. You may experience something which you choose to interpret as the evidence of a deity, but if you can't demonstrate it, then there is no good reason for anyone else to believe you.
On the other hand, when i am driving down the road, and i approach an intersection at which the light has just turned green, indicating that i may proceed through the intersection, i do so, having faith that cross-traffic will stop. It is not blind faith, because my experience tells me that this will be so. One night, i missed being the victim of a fatal traffic accident literally by inches, when i was able to turn the steering wheel hard to the left, and avoid a collision with an idiot who drove at high speed through the intersection i had just entered, despite having a red light facing his direction of travel. That, however, was an exception which proves the rule, and i still have a rational faith based upon long experience that it is safe to enter an intersection when there is a green light facing my direction of travel.
It is something for which i do not require special, arcane wisdom, nor for which there need be any obscure interpretation of the visual evidence. If the light is green, the evidence of my experience is that my faith that cross traffic will stop is well placed.
We are educated in school in science, for instance, but science involves something that can be proved or disproved, known, in other words; otherwise it's treated as a theory.
Religion concerns the unknowable, not the unknown but the unknowable. If we follow an authority that claims to be an authority on the unknowable or claims that a book is an authority on the unknowable then you have to question that belief or adhere to it blindly.
If you were indoctrinated into a certain religion or belief as a child, then you may accept it without question. However, others that weren't indoctrinated as children don't necessarily accept that same belief.
By studying the myths of other religions past and present, you will find them impossible to believe literally, but those of other religions will find the myths of your religion also unbelievable. However, you may find that the stories and myths are simply variations of similar themes and, therefore, that they are describing human experience and life using different stories and myths.
What I'm saying is that it might be useful to you to consider looking at myths and religious symbols as metaphors describing something impossible to talk about using prose or literal words. It's easy to see the metaphor in other religions, especially ancient religions like the Greeks, but it's more difficult to see the possibility of metaphor in your own religion.
Religion to me is not holding strongly to a concept of a god but totally allowing an open mind. Freedom of mind is necessary for a religious mind. If you cling to other's ideas of god, can you have a free mind?
Hey Baddog1,
Few actions in my life are based on faith. The distinction is clearly that those times I put faith in anything, it is based on who I am putting faith in.
I put faith in people. this includes my friends family and myself.
Given a daily chore, I can certainly put faith, which I will simply refer to as: "I trust" that certain things will continue to happen as they have happened before.
I kno0w that people trust (have faith) that I will probably be asleep at 10AM during the summer when class is out of session. Their faith is not based of nothing, it is basedon the fact that I sleep late. Further, I probably tell them first hand that I will be asleep. There is little to guess on, so the faith required is very little. The only chance that the faith gets tested is in the circumstance that I cognatively alter my own pattern.
Religious faith is not based on a pattern, but instead singularities. It is nothing worth putting faith in, because no pattern has been estblished to even base it on.
Furhter, if one were to argue that tha pattern is established, in say christianity, the pattern would simply suggest that religion is over, and to put fith elsewhere.
Quote:Is there a criteria used to decide when you choose to believe in faith and when you do not?
When there is no solid information or evidence, but the absence of these do not relieve you of the obligation to act in any given situation. When doing anything is better than nothing at all. But if those two are the same I'd rather do nothing.
Setanta- The word "faith" has a number of meanings. When one speaks about god, or miracles, etc. one is discussing a "belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence."
What you have described is the other definition of faith, which is confidence about something based on experience. For instance, every day of your life the sun has risen in the morning, and sets in the evening. If you have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, your conclusion has been based on empirical experience.
If you believe that a god will cause the sun to orbit about the moon tomorrow, that is belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.
I have faith in nothing. In the traffic situation described by setanta, I have to behave as though I have that kind, or else be unable to drive. Nothing is certain. This I come to know more and more as I get older. One can be a faithful believer, rich, comfortable, or just happy in good works. Then, zow! tornado, murder, war- any force of destruction can turn such a life into torture or complete obliteration at a moment's notice. It happens to faithful and nonfaithful alike. All that divides the atheist from the deist in such circumstances is the deist's belief, and that is suspect, in my book.
Phoenix32890 wrote:Setanta- The word "faith" has a number of meanings. When one speaks about god, or miracles, etc. one is discussing a "belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence."
etc., etc. . . .
I clearly made a distinction in my post between blind faith and rational faith. Frankly, i didn't need the rather simple-minded lesson you attempted to give me. I understand the distinctions you are attempting to make, and don't accept the definition which is quoted above. Blind faith is blind faith, whether or not it has religious trappings. People who are obsessed by astrology, for example, are exercising a blind faith which in no way differs from religious devotion.
Blind faith is credulity.
True faith requires an understanding similar to that in the traffic light example.
However, if that "true" faith entails belief in a deity, you've got a long way to go to demonstrate that experience has lead you to such an assumption.
Setanta wrote:However, if that "true" faith entails belief in a deity, you've got a long way to go to demonstrate that experience has lead you to such an assumption.
As it takes (for me, at least) a long course to attain such faith.
I did not dismiss the idea of a loving God simply because of the objections of others.
You're begging the question again--in fact, you're begging several questions. If, as you assert, your "faith" that there is a god is not mere credulity, you have not demonstrated a rational basis for believing such a deity exists. You have not provided any evidence that if such a deity existed, it would care more for you than for any other living thing, or any other sentient being, should more than those represented by humanity exist. You have not provided any rational basis for assuming that a deity would wish to be "loved" by you.
Setanta wrote:You're begging the question again--in fact, you're begging several questions. If, as you assert, your "faith" that there is a god is not mere credulity, you have not demonstrated a rational basis for believing such a deity exists. You have not provided any evidence that if such a deity existed, it would care more for you than for any other living thing, or any other sentient being, should more than those represented by humanity exist. You have not provided any rational basis for assuming that a deity would wish to be "loved" by you.
As I have tried to explain before, it is as a result of personal experience. You cannot have
my personal experience. If you wish to share in it, you will have to experience it for yourself. The main justification I can offer for trying is to repeat the promise God made to Adam and Eve in the form of his instructions given in Genesis. We were made to live forever on earth without war and crime and sickness and death. If that is not reason enough for further investigation, I can't imagine what could be.
Quote:We were made to live forever on earth without war and crime and sickness and death. If that is not reason enough for further investigation, I can't imagine what could be.
The first sentence entails an assumption which you have not demonstrated, nor for which have you provided the least plausible evidence. Therefore, you lack of imagination evinced in the second sentence is meaningless.
Since you assert with a consistency hardly to be ignored by anyone who routinely reads your posts that the dead are dead, and that there is no afterlife, i guess you must be hoping for the end of days in your own lifetime so that you can live on the earth without death. Or, perhaps, you don't care.
Setanta wrote:Quote:We were made to live forever on earth without war and crime and sickness and death. If that is not reason enough for further investigation, I can't imagine what could be.
The first sentence entails an assumption which you have not demonstrated, nor for which have you provided the least plausible evidence. Therefore, you lack of imagination evinced in the second sentence is meaningless.
It must be fun to figure out ways to miss the point. Would it have made more sense if I said the bible
claims that "We were made to live forever on earth without war and crime and sickness and death. If that is not reason enough for further investigation, I can't imagine what could be."?
You seem to seek ways to miss the point i have been making in this thread and the other. You also seem to be losing your temper.
For the bible to be an authoritative source on what the "purpose" of life on earth is, you'd be obliged to demonstrate that it is infallible, and that it refers to a deity which you are able to plausibly demonstrate exists.
Failing that, your faith is ever bit the credulity which you condemn in others.
Setanta wrote:You seem to seek ways to miss the point i have been making in this thread and the other. You also seem to be losing your temper.
For the bible to be an authoritative source on what the "purpose" of life on earth is, you'd be obliged to demonstrate that it is infallible, and that it refers to a deity which you are able to plausibly demonstrate exists.
Failing that, your faith is ever bit the credulity which you condemn in others.
Me lose my temper?
No coffee for you!
No donut, either. Unless you'd rather have a scone. Well you can't have that, then!
It may be possible, but I can't
demonstrate by syllogism,
by mathematics,
photograph,
or otherwise categorically prove the existence of God.
But I can show circumstantial and anecdotal evidence which each must judge according to their own standards. In the past a few people have humored me at least to the point of considering my evidence to its conclusion. And I am satisfied with the realization that I can't make any one believe.
I'm going to give over. I can't remember any longer if this is the thread in which i'm being nice to you, or the thread in which i'm being mean to you.
But don't relax, Bubba, i'm gonna get you in the end.
I'll remember not to turn my back
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