[QUOTE=Gozu]
Horrifying? To whom? Humans? the particles that make us? to gravity? You can see horror in a spider slowly dismembering its prey and taking its time in eating it but only when you’re not looking through your scientist glasses. Then, it becomes fascinating. Genocide becomes fascinating. Supernovas that may obliterate trillions of lifeforms become fascinating.
[/quote]
First, scientists aren’t the monsters you are trying to imply; they do tend to find genocide horrible. And “fascinating” isn’t “pretty” or “admirable”. And it’s horrifying to us; the group that you are arguing with.
[QUOTE=Gozu]
Saying that trust is not faith may be a practical shortcut for everyday life matters, but when you’re talking metaphysics, saying that trust is not faith is like saying it’s turtles all the way down.
[/quote]
Wrong. Fact based beliefs are fundamentally different than baseless beliefs. The need to constantly claim otherwise is one of the destructive effects of religion.
[QUOTE=Gozu]
Your faith is reassuring :D.
[/quote]
An assumption based on knowledge and past experience isn’t faith.
[QUOTE=Gozu]
I’m speaking about THE enigma of course.
[/quote]
:rolleyes: That tells me exactly nothing.
[QUOTE=Gozu]
In your opinion, religion is only harmful when it gets in the way of science, yes?
[/quote]
No, religion tends to corrupt or destroy everything it touches.
[QUOTE=Gozu]
What about enslaving a few million people every year and using them in human experiments? I bet you’re against it because you think it’s morally wrong and horrifying. Is that moral judgement a fantasy that you insist is true? Are you just biased because you’re human and you think you’re special? 
[/quote]
I am special, being a person. Rocks have no opinions, no desires, no awareness.
And my moral judgement is an assertion of what I believe to be desirable, based on human history, self interest, what I believe to be the interests of others, and so on. Not faith; I don’t particularly care if it’s true in some objective fashion. An assertion of desire isn’t faith either.
[QUOTE=Gozu]
I hypothesize that, on some level, vast numbers of scientists were driven by their search for God (hoping to find or not find is a different matter).
[/quote]
No doubt; I also have no doubt that it hobbled them to believe in God, and often led them to false conclusions. Scientists tend to be less religious than the general population because religion and science are fundamentally incompatible, and mental compartmentalization doesn’t always work.
[QUOTE=Gozu]
I also agree that many people are idiots incapable of comprehending anything beyond a few simplistic things and some of them are arrogant or selfish and they want to impose their asinine views by force, which is just not nice at all.
[/QUOTE]
And reducing people to that state is one of the major things religion does.
[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
The word “faith” is a tricky one because it has multiple meanings and connotations. However, one of the more common meanings of “faith” is as a synonym for “trust.”
[/QUOTE]
Except that what we have here is an obvious attempt to validate faith by pretending it’s the same as trust. An attempt to pretend that faith without evidence is just as valid, just as sensible as trust based on evidence. People start by claiming that faith is as good as trust, using the definition of faith that is a synonym for trust; then halfway through the argument they start using the definition of faith that means belief without evidence, without bothering to mention that they’ve switched.
The believers are using word games, because they have nothing real to back up their beliefs.