We tolerate a lot of opinions on this board, including those that you have been spouting over the last few weeks.
We do not, however, allow people to insult other posters while hiding behind a veneer of religious (or irreligious) belief.
Do not do this again.
(And do not reply that you were simply explaining some odd belief in something that you consider “truth.” Your post, as written, is a deliberate effort ot be insulting. Most of your posts are little tirades that walk along the line of insult, but in this case you have crossed it. If you continue, you will forfeit your posting privileges.)
I think a lot of people need faith. And by a lot, I mean all.
I have faith that I’ll be around here tomorrow. I have faith that someone loves me. I have faith that exercising and eating fruits and vegetables is keeping me healthy. I have faith that a 100-lb python isn’t about to crash down on me from the ceiling.
I have to believe in all of these things, or else I would be paralyzed by fear and hopelessness.
I think all of us construct a narrative that help us to be brave and hopeful. For most of us, God is a part of that narrative.
Few if any of those things are examples of faith. Faith is believing something without evidence or against the evidence. If you have faith that a python is not going to fall on you while looking at a great big snake crawling out of a ceiling vent, that’s not something you need.
Faith means different things to different people. Unfortunately for some, it means not questioning a literal belief in some particular dogma even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. For others it just means the psychological or spiritual fortitude to face or even embrace any experience without suffering. People often either confuse the two, or mistakenly believe the latter is predicated on the the former, which is not, and in fact creates a situation where the faith is superficial and static rather than authentic and dynamic.
Faith is like anything else. You can have a whole lot of it and believe in unicorns and fairies. Or you can have just a little of it and believe hitting the light switch isn’t going to detonate a bomb somewhere.
I have plenty of evidence that I’m not very smart. We can argue whether this evidence is good or not, but it does exists. Yet, I have to have faith that I am not dumb for me to do my job. If I accepted the evidence as proof, then I wouldn’t have the confidence to stand in front of audiences, moderate conference calls, or respond to emails. I’d be a depressed wreck.
I have evidence that my city is a dangerous, scary place. But that doesn’t stop me from walking the streets all by myself, with nary a weapon or even a cell phone. (I told you have evidence that I’m not very smart!) I have faith that the danger lurking around me will not directly affect me.
There are all kinds of things we don’t have proof of, but that we still accept as true. Like love, for instance. Love can never be proved. Yet most of us believe that someone loves us. If we didn’t, we would have long killed ourselves a long time ago.
A person with very severe OCD lacks faith. They don’t believe the evidence in front of them, the assurances of others, or that nebulous thing called “conventional wisdom”. These people suffer tremenduously and are unable to function. What this tells me is that being able to suspend doubt and analytical reasoning, at least at a basic level, is essential for happiness. I think some amount of faith is hard-wired in us.
Is this faith - or a quite rational analysis of probability? If you are playing poker and betting on a hand because you have faith - in your sense - that it is good, would your world be rocked if you lose? (A better example than yours since people who get mugged might likely overestimate the danger later.)
Almost nothing can be proved. But most people have lots of evidence. My wife is there with me every night. She says she loves me. She acts like she loves me. We’ve been married over 30 years. And things could happen which would falsify my belief that she loves me. Faith in the religious sense is more like some teenager thinking a hot starlet he’s never met loves him, on the evidence of her (or her staff) writing love and kisses on a headshot.
Do you think that expecting something to fall when you drop it involves faith?
Sure, it’s faith. I am not a criminologist. I don’t research the latest crime statistics by zip code. I don’t know how dangerous my city actually is. It could be Mayberry or Beirut, for all I know. I don’t do a rational analysis of anything when I step foot out of my door.
However, I do know that my city has a reputation for being dangerous. Every time I turn on the news, I hear horrific stories of random, senseless violence. On a daily basis I hear the wail of police sirens. Every time I tell someone about my walking habit, they caution me to be very careful. Their lectures join the lectures I’ve received my entire life about how dangerous cities are for women. And on a daily basis, I walk by individuals who fit the stereotypical profile of a scary criminal, and some of them probably are criminals. So I am confronted with all kinds of evidence about how dangerous my world is–much more evidence than I have of its safety. The only evidence I have of my safety is that I haven’t been harmed yet.
If it’s not faith for me to clutch onto one piece of (questionable) evidence while ignoring all the others, then I guess I don’t know what faith is.
But you don’t know that it’s not all front. You don’t KNOW that she just doesn’t put up with you for the security you provide and the warmth of your body in bed. Lots of people think their spouses love them…only to find out that their spouse wants a divorce and has been cheating on them with another person for a long time. What we believe is often wrong.
Have you ever said to myself, “I know my wife loves me”? Wouldn’t believing this require a leap of faith? If you were a completely rational person, you would say, “I think my wife loves me because she does X, Y, and Z.” Because you can’t really know. You can only think. And yet, I’m willing to bet you would say you know. I suspect you would say this because you’d want your wife to also know that you love her. Most folk wouldn’t be satisfied if their SO said to them, all tentatively and analytically, “I think you love me, yes?” We want our loved ones to know we love them. Even though these things can’t be known with 100% certainty. This is the kind of faith I’m talking about.
There are Believers who would stop believing in God if they had good evidence. I say this because I once believed in God and then realized the “evidence” I had wasn’t good enough. If it happened to me, it can happen to others. For someone else, it may take something a lot more gut-punching (like a tragic death of a loved one). Being able to let go of a belief doesn’t mean it still wasn’t “faith-based”. It just means that the faith eventually lost out to “enough” reason.
If I’m on a tight wire stretched over the Grand Canyon, with no harness or net underneath, what do I tell myself? Do I study the likelihood of me falling off the wire? Or do I tell myself a story about how I’m blessed with a special gift, one that has never failed me in the past and is not going to fail me now?
It’s not just the religious who are constantly telling themselves stories.
We were told that faith could move mountains, but no one believed it; we are now told that the atomic bombs can remove mountains, and everyone believes it.—Bertrand Russell
Do you recall what that evidence was you thought you had when you believed in God? Is it any different than what quite a few believers use today such as anecdotes and personal revelations?
“Mommy and Daddy and everyone else believe in God. So of course he must exist!” This was the “evidence” I had. IT’s no wonder that it fell apart once I reached adulthood.
Yet I must say…direct observation and deductive reasoning still only account for some of my beliefs. Most of what I “know” is just stuff I have been taught by others. I trust that they aren’t giving me bad information. So while I can admit that it was crazy of me to believe in God just because other people told me I should, I can’t say I have broken the “gullible” habit completely.
You don’t need to be a criminologist. Using the Merriam-Webster dictionary for “faith” and also for “reason”, I’d say you used reason, not faith in being able to determine if it was safe enough for you to go outside. Having some idea of your evidence, you didn’t need faith to determine the odds were quite good that you would come back home safe.
Despite how dangerous you say your city is, you still choose to go out in it. I do the same thing, although don’t think my city is that dangerous based on what I already know about it. I know we have had 5 murders in my city of a population of 100,000 for this year. I’ve determined that the probability is quite low for me to get murdered. Also having some idea about where many of these murders often occur, and time of day, without knowing the exact statistics of every violent crime, but by logically just staying out of certain areas, during certain times of the day, I like my odds. Even going into those violent areas during the worst time of the day, I would still like my odds.
If I told you that, given the crime stats of your locale, you have a 1 in 10 chance of being a victim of a violent crime over the next year, would you still take a daily constitutional?
How about 1 in 6? 1 in 4?
Where’s the tipping point that decides “rational decision-making” from “faith”?
I used to take walks and ride my bike all up and down the streets of Newark, NJ as a young, non-threatening looking woman. A couple of times I did so in the middle of the night. The odds of me getting harmed were still low (though this concept is only meaningful when it’s related to something else…the odds were low compared to what I’d find in war-torn Syria, let’s just say). But in most people’s minds, my actions were still foolish. And despite all my positive and neutral experiences, I would be likely to agree. I don’t even think walking past dead bodies on the sidewalk would have kept me home-bound.
What’s funny is that I’d probably be pee-in-my-pants scared if you dropped me in rural Bumblefuck. I have more faith in the safety of cities, I guess you can say.
You’re using even more evidentiary statements now than before to base your decision on which deals more in probability. If those odds were correct, say even 1 in 4, that isn’t reassuring to me I’m as safe as I once thought I was. I’ll alter my decision based on my own personal observations, experiences and determine the best I can of my ability what to make of the new evidence if it holds up.
If a religious man of faith came to the same conclusion, then he is using more reason than he probably cares to admit also. OTOH, if he chose to ignore all evidence and felt every bit as safe as before, despite the best evidence showing quite the contrary, then I think that demonstrates again the problem many have with faith when they start taking this stuff a bit more serious than they should and could lead to disastrous results. How do you feel about this?
I know at least one person (maybe two, not sure for the other) who, I’m quite certain, would collapse psychologically if she were to lose her faith.
So, yes, I’m convinced that some people need the hope their faith provides to face the hardships of life (death of loved ones, unjust events, pointlessness of life, whatever…).
I like how you describe it, save that the last paragraph is not even necessarily so. There need be no belief in a specifically malevolent force for faith to handle these types of painful situations, but rather it would be enough to have faith that these misfortunes fit somewhere within a Big Picture that is so really, really stupendously big you can’t wrap your mind about it, or that (as with the OP’s Karma-believing friend) somehow the Cosmos balances it out in the end.
Not even an afterlife is strictly necessary – even if a person may accept that individually death is lights out, end of game, nothingness, s/he may still feel there has got to be some sort of greater meaning or balancing force beyond the merely utilitarian. Because having existed and having experienced what it is like to think, to feel, to perceive, to enjoy and to suffer, to see meanings and patterns and causes and effects and to try to fathom purposes, then saying to yourself that it all happens with no sense and to no end, devoid of meaning, and the best you can do is minimize pain, is daunting. So a person would say: “All real evidence points to that all this is for no purpose, there’s no meaning to it… then why go on?” and faith would be the one thing that keeps them from despair.
But you know there is a probability that something bad could happen - and if something does (Og forbid) your previous calculations are not invalid, and you would eventually do the same stuff, maybe more carefully. Not to mention that your internal probability calculations are likely wrong. There is the concept of availability, which involves using what you have heard as the numerator. If you hear about lots of murders, you will judge the probability of getting murdered higher than someone who doesn’t listen to the news. Most people think more Americans are murdered than commit suicide - which isn’t true. The reason is that murders get covered, and suicides usually don’t.
Religious beliefs are usually yes/no, and strong evidence against them gets ignored because of faith.
But you are not clutching at questionable evidence - you are making a cost benefit analysis - the benefit of not being locked in your house versus the cost of getting attacked times the probability of being attacked. You don’t give yourself enough credit.
All beliefs are conditional. Faith isn’t. Newton’s laws were believed in at least as fundamentally as Christianity, yet got dumped when the evidence turned against them being universally applicable. Not so religion - which is why when we talk about evidence we get talk about faith in return.
I took Theory of Knowledge in college so I can get very picky about what “know” means. If that is what you mean by faith, then we “know” the sun is coming up by tomorrow morning by faith, we “know” the bridge would disappear by faith, etc. That means we “know” all but the results of mathematical proofs simple enough to be error-free by faith. Actually we have tons of evidence that the sun will come up, by understanding the solar system and by induction, and precious little that god exists. So your use of faith pretty much dilutes it, and equates belief in things without evidence with belief in things with tons of evidence. That is in a sense saying a 1% probability event is the same as a 99.99999…% probability event.
People without much faith (like me) can change based on evidence, but those with lots of faith are immune to evidence. Look at how many people claim their faith is stronger after the death of a loved one. As for me, I read in a Bible about the multiple authors of the Bible, said “that makes sense” and never looked back. It was not in the slightest big gut-wrenching.
They are equivalent, since your probability of falling depends strongly on how good your special gift is.
I need faith to live in this troubled world.
Faith that tomorrow will come whether I feel like it or not.
Faith that most people will treat me kindly with a modicum of respect.
Faith that there will be food on the table and a roof over my head.
I need experience to know these things not evidence.
I need new experiences all the time.