Nonsense. Marxism/Communism is just as faith based as any religion; I’ve called it a religion myself. It simply asserts that the world works the way it says it does, ignores evidence to the contrary, and suppresses or kills anyone who disagrees; that’s classic faith based, religious behavior. Rationality is not involved.
The more devout/faithful, the bigger the idiot/asshole.
Still, I don’t feel I’ve ever met a truly faithful person. Only in times of WTF do people seem to claim faith. That may make sense. Since faith really means “I don’t understand, but my invisible friend does,” the more faithful a person claims to be is a good measure of how unaware or unintelligent that person is.
If you know they aren’t true, I’d say you don’t believe them. You’re *pretending *to believe them.
What’s the difference? It’s all about choosing what side you’re on.
I’m lying to myself with the hope that it’ll become true. It’s a form of magical thinking, and very effective at getting things done.
Plus, it makes me happy; and logically speaking, isn’t that what’s important?
I’m glad it makes you happy, but it (as per the OP) isn’t admirable. I don’t think it’s naughty or anything, mind you. Getting the most happiness out of life as you can is a good thing.
So if getting the most happiness out of life as you can is a good thing, and faith helps you maximize happiness, then wouldn’t that make faith a good thing and an admirable quality?
No. For one thing, as someone once said “happiness alone is only enough if you are a cow”; would a brain implant that keeps you sitting in a corner drooling in perfect permanent happiness be a good thing?
For another, even if faith does make you happy (and in factit is correlated with social dysfunction, not happiness) that doesn’t mean it isn’t making the people around you miserable. Just because the mother beating her son for being gay is happy in her self righteousness doesn’t make her faith a good thing.
I prefer to judge people based on their actions, not on thoughts that may or may not lead to such actions.
Well, in that case, the problem isn’t that she has faith in something. The problem is that she believes it’s a good thing to beat her son for being gay. That study isn’t a look at faith, it’s a look at religiosity, specifically Christian religiosity.
This part in the OP is I think a complete strawman. There is nothing in the definition of faith that says that the object of faith is necessarily irrational or unknowable. Faith, when used in both common English usage or in religious usage simply means to trust or commit oneself to an idea or statement. The statement may be completely rational and provable, or it may not. In the latter case faith there is better described as “blind faith”.
To use a non-religious example, suppose two people, Bob and John are going skydiving. They both may have lots of reasons to believe that if you jump out of the plane, you will survive. You have seen many others do it, your instructor tells you it will be fine, there are conspicuously few reports of people falling to their deaths skydiving, ect. Yet when they both get up in the plane when the instructor tells you to jump and it will all be fine Bob jumps, but John does not. Bob has faith in the premise that skydiving in those conditions is safe, as evidenced by his willingness to jump out of the plane. John on the other hand, in spite of all the rational arguments to the contrary, ultimately does not have faith. Trust is the key issue, not the rationality of the object of faith.
Ultimately the OP commits the fallacy of Too narrow a definition. Faith is trust in any proposition, not just in irrational or unprovable propositions. The real question therefore is whether or not religion is itself necessarily irrational, and whether faith in inherently irrational statements is bad. I don’t think that it is, and therefore presuming that faith in something rational is admirable, then religious faith can be admirable.
Calculon.
I have faith that most people are above getting riled up over obvious attempts to demean other’s belief systems.
I have to ask… can you even envision the possibility, that sometimes, just sometimes, it might actually be a good thing for some particular belief system to be demeaned?
Do you think (and I mean think, I don’t mean believe) that all belief systems are equally valid? Or might some be more valid than others? Might some, in fact, not be downright stupid?
I’d agree, but it seems to me this boils down, yet again, to the imprecision, the fluffiness, of natural languages.
I agree with BG that the type of faith he dismisses, unevidenced-or-counter-evidenced belief, is something to be despised rather than admired. But English, being a natural language, then pulls a classic bait-and-switch, and says that another accepted meaning of the word ‘faith’ is more like ‘trust’ or ‘induction’, that is, justified belief. In short, ‘faith’ just seems to mean ‘belief’, and it can be justified or unjustified according to whatever the person using the word happens to be thinking about at the time.
So this then leads on naturally to the con-game that apologists for the irrational will try to play on the rational, where they conflate the different meanings. So when someone like BG points out that believing things without or against the evidence is bad, and quite sensibly uses the word ‘faith’ to describe such a mode of thought, we’ll all go ‘oh but how terrible things would be if you didn’t have faith in your friends and family’, also quite sensibly using the word ‘faith’, and then we can all have a go at braying how intolerant and stupid the ‘other side’ may be…
And all that while the central point will have been carefully bundled out the door while no one was looking. The central point being, of course, that it is profoundly stupid to give beliefs that lack evidence or go against current evidence, the same respect and consideration that we should give to evidenced beliefs.
And that is why we smart irreligious people keep getting into scraps with you stupid religious people. [no smiley here, I mean it]
In English there are perfectly good phrases for trust in something that is not evidently true or rational to believe. “Blind faith” is one such term. If the OP wishes to make the point that unevidenced faith is not admirable as opposed to evidenced faith, then he should be more careful in his use of language. The OP however states that “All faith – all faith – is a form of wishful thinking”, and thus makes no such distinction.
I agree that it is not wise to have faith in things that are not evidently true or rational. However it has not been established that religion generally or any specific religion is in fact irrational and therefore comes under the limited definition of faith given in the OP. For instance I consider the Christian belief to be ultimately rational and not a “faith” in the sense of the OP. If anything I find atheism far more irrational than Christian belief, and so under the definition of the OP would have to consider it more of a faith than Christianity.
The problem is the fallacy of equivocation that is committed when faith is used both to refer (incorrectly) to a blind trust, and also a religious belief. The “smart” (;)) irreligous person then asserts that because religous belief is a “faith” it must involve blind trust. If one actually bothers to read theologians and philosphers of religion you will see that there are a number of rational arguments of different types for the existence of God. You may not be convinced by them, but they do exist, and give their respective religions a rational foundation. To claim that all religions are inherently irrational is a huge claim and not one that I can see backed up by any argumentation or evidence. That is the real irrationality that is going on.
Calculon.
snip.
Which bits exactly and why?
Of course, you are completely wrong. It’s a leftover barbarian myth system, and no more rational than believing in Santa Claus or the Greek gods; less, if anything given how extreme Christianity is with all its “omni-” claims.
And of course you are again wrong; atheism is completely consistent with all known facts, and requires no faith at all. Christianity on the other hand requires a level of denial of reality and logic that is essentially solipsistic in its intensity. Which is why so many religious debates here end with the religious types retreating into what amounts to solipsism; only by denying objective reality can they defend their beliefs, given how at odds with reality Christianity is.
No they don’t; such “rational” arguments never hold up. And of course I doubt you’ll actually produce any of those “rational” arguments, because then people will rip them apart.
A ‘smart’ atheist chiming in here, to disagree with you.
The ‘con’ game, if you want to resort to calling names, is purported by those who insist that religious faith is inherently of a different sort than faith in oneself, or one’s fellow man.
Faith is a belief in what will be, that gives emotionally satisfying feedback. You can argue that the facts (or lack thereof) on which a person is basing his or her faith are faulty, but the act of having faith is one that is practiced universally by theists and atheists alike, albeit about different subjects*.
(This is also why calling religious people stupid is wrong-headed. No person acts completely rationally and in response only to proven facts. Picking on another person’s (perceived) irrationality and calling them stupid for it is hypocritical and jerkish)
*Just to be clear, I am not implying that science is inherently a faith-based endeavor.
Of course it is. I’m real, they are real; that alone puts it in a different category. One of the defining characteristics of religious faith is that it is blind and baseless. You are supposed to just believe; regardless of logic, regardless of the facts.
Unfortunately you are incorrect. All religions are based on a belief in some entity you can neither see, hear nor otherwise prove exists. There may be a rational basis for a lot of religeous doctrine (like not killing or stealing). But really, when you look at it, those are the only two commandments that are actually felonies. The first four are basically “God rules” and the remaining four can be summed up as “don’t be a jerk”.
It would help if, for the purpose of this discussion, posters say if they are referring to regular faith or blind faith.