Question open to your interpretation. I will say though, that I am not necessarily talking about religious faith. If however, that is how you wish to relate it, please do.
(I will chime back in if this thread gets any traction)
Sure, sure…why should you participate until you KNOW it will get some traction?
I’m with you, I’ll wait and see!
The natural state is one of rationality. You may gain faith in a person based on how you want them to be or faith in an idea despite it not being rational due to an attachment to the ideology behind it. Personhood comes with inherent agnosticism.
I think a baby is born with nothing but faith, that his every need will be met by an an unfathomable agency, and maturity is a process of gradually dispelling one miracle after another until intellectual realization substitutes notions of causation.
Faith is “belief in what we haven’t seen”. It can be gained, it can be lost. Sometimes, faith which was lost is regained, or faith which was gained is lost.
For example, when my brothers were little they had faith that I’d help them. I was the provider of after-school sandwiches, the creator of landscapes on which their toy soldiers could enact mighty battles, the blower of noses and patter of backs. At one point, I left the nest; they still had faith but I wasn’t available as much as I had. One of my brothers at one point decided to blame me for I’m not even sure what, but it appears to be a lot of bad things. He lost faith.
Eventually that brother became a father; thought back to his childhood years, and saw that hey, maybe I wasn’t the best caretaker, but I’d been a good one and I’d done my best in a pretty bad situation. This led to the belief that I’d also do my best for his child. A better understanding has made this adult faith stronger.
The other brother’s faith changed from a child’s to an adult’s, but he never stopped believing that I’d have his back.
LOL. Okay miss Elbows
I was debating with myself is faith something that is earned or lost?
I came to the conclusion TRUST is earned, faith is inherent.
In other words: I have faith uncle Joe will beat his abusive drinking habit. But until then, I’m keeping the liquor cabinet locked.
Faith is to be outgrown.
I think this is the correct answer.
Question: if I believe something “on faith,” and then I verify that thing, by finding strong evidence or proof of it, so that now I believe it more strongly or for better reason than before, have I lost or gained faith in that thing?
Interesting question and good answers here. In an effort to better-define faith, I’ve a question.
When I’m travelling on a dark, 2-lane road in a heavy downpour, do I have faith that none of the oncoming traffic is going to cross the line? Or is it trust? I’d like to think it’s faith, because I don’t know that I trust them.
Experientially, I’ve rarely had anyone cross the line while I was driving down the road. That’s a non-zero number, however, and I know from news reports that it happens occasionally with catastrophic consequences. With that in-mind, I’m leaning toward this scenario being a matter of faith instead of trust.
I think this faith was inspired *through *trust. I was taught that people should stay on their side of the line and I’ve trusted them to do so even after they’ve proven that they don’t (always). Though my trust has wavered, I don’t think my faith has.
Religiously, I think faith can ebb and flow.
I believe that children are born with absolute certainty that the world is going to treat them well and that everything really is going to be ok. This is a kind of faith. The belief in a system where good will prevail and the end results will be good ones. As we mature, and events buffet that early certainty, we either redefine our faith or we lose it. For example, we may now realize that everything isn’t necessarily going to be alright, but may still believe that there is a structure in the universe that leads to more good outcomes than bad outcomes, and that even bad outcomes may serve some higher purpose of which we are unaware.
Once we are adults, faith becomes a choice. We can choose to continue with our belief in a structure that we simply aren’t able to understand, or we can start to poke holes in it, doubt it, and ultimately reject it.
Yet there are people who will say that they have found faith later in life. Not just religious faith, although I think that make up the bulk of such findings of faith. Perhaps there has been an event which opened their eyes or caused them to rethink or abandon their doubts.
So I guess, ultimately, I’m waffling. I think we’re all born with faith that matures as we mature. At the point of our greatest ability to exercise logic over our world, we either choose to keep that faith or we abandon it. So faith is ours to lose.
But on those occasions when someone regains their faith later in life, due to some event or a change in their thinking, faith is also ours to gain.
[QUOTE=shunpiker;19320485
When I’m travelling on a dark, 2-lane road in a heavy downpour, do I have faith that none of the oncoming traffic is going to cross the line? Or is it trust? I’d like to think it’s faith, because I don’t know that I trust them…[/QUOTE]
No, that’s trust. You have learned to trust society to behave in an orderly fashion for its mutual good, and that includes drivers of cars. Faith, in the sense of this discussion, means faith in an agent whose motives and behaviors cannot be empirically determined by rational analysis. Traffic patterns can be, with a high enough degree of certainty that they can be trusted. But a prudent driver always (one hopes) drives in a manner that will cover him if a rogue driver is out of tolerance, because again, previous experience and learning have furnished the driver with a sense that the trust cannot be 100%.
It stops being faith, when an event can be predicted using logical analysis based on known data… It b ecomes trust in your ability to analyze the data and reach valid conslusions of statistical probability.
Faith has to be gained first, before it is lost.
As to the “natural state” being rationality, I’ve never seen such a claim, and I think it’s untrue. An infant is in a natural state and is certainly not rational.
I haven’t had enough time to mull this question over and provide a well-thought out response. However, I do want to say that I don’t think I’m totally on board with the idea expressed by several people, that infants have absolute faith that their every need will be provided for. I don’t think that’s faith so much as helplessness. I mean, if an infant does not have faith that he will be fed, would he behave any differently? He’d cry either way.
I came in here to argue sort of the opposite direction.
I don’t think a 4-6 year-old kid really has faith. They’re just spouting something they learned in Sunday school that they really don’t comprehend. They might say they believe, but it’s robotic.
Ergo, people can acquire faith as they get older, learn the actual meaning of what they are believing, etc.
Ditto those conversions on the order of what sidewalk preachers do. The person’s underlying faith really hasn’t changed. They are still who they were 5 minutes before. It takes time for the actual faith to build into something with meaning to them.
Even in the New Testament, the various disciples Jesus collected often seemed to be unsure of their faith. While a “road to Damascus” moment might initiate a change in point of view that results in a fairly quick change, those don’t happen that often and still must take some time to assimilate into ones psyche.
Losing faith, OTOH, can happen in an instant.
You’ve replaced faith with reason.
The OP is not self-explanatory, unless faith is put into a context. Are we talking about faith in a spouse remaining constant, or in a cable company providing customer support, or in a deity hearing our prayers, or our drugs curing our illness?
In any case, faith can be shifted either by the acquisition of new empirical data (gained), or by the suspension of prior-held expectations (lost).
There’s an enormous difference between the crying of despair and that of “yo! Woman! Feed me!” and one of the signs of abuse or neglect in children is that the child doesn’t express himself, doesn’t communicate (not autistic children or shyness, but neuro-typical children not showing interest and doing their best to become shadows). Children whose caretakers do not meet their needs end up having great attachment problems, the most spectacular cases being those children from warehouse orphanages who can never really form attachments (not every child from such an institution ends up like that, but it’s one of those things in which one is too many).
jtur88, the OP was purposefully not self-explanatory. I understood it to mean that one of the things he wanted was to see what definitions and types we talked about.
Indeed I was. Thank you.
I think just the opposite. If an infant has faith it will be fed, it wouldn’t be screaming and crying all the time. Infants are born with need, and no faith at all that their needs will be fulfilled.