Not that it couldn’t theoretically be used as a narcotic - despite that not being Marx’s intention with the quote.
No argument from me there, but I don’t like that Marx’s actual wording gets linked to the cynical harsh pejorative modern sense of “opiate” rather than his rather mild chiding tone in the actual text. It’s somewhat distorting, is all.
Yes, which is why politically redefining the word ‘faith’ is a cheap shot.
Faith is absolutely a synonym for trust. Faith in and of itself is a word with a neutral meaning. One can have faith in something and be wrong, and one can have faith in something and be right. The same is true of trust, one can have trust in something and be wrong and one can have trust in something else and be right. We can trust a scientist only to find out later that he’s a crackpot and watch a whole slew of theories based on his work fall under the bright light of scrutiny. Everyone acts with faith every day. To claim that one doesn’t operate under the auspices of faith is simply a lie, to put it quite frankly. We all move forward with incomplete information throughout a myriad of decisions every day. We hope that the solution to situations we are presented with will resemble closely enough past situations that we will have the skills to deal with them. That is faith. Faith deals with our relationship to imperfect sensory input. We can hedge our bets by honing our reasoning faculties, but to say that one operates without using faith in their daily life is to say that one makes decisions with perfect knowledge, it’s a lie, plainly. The problem here is the political will to semantically turn faith into a perjorative in order to achieve some sense of rhetorical victory against religion poisons the well and makes honest debate impossible.
I disagree. At least I disagree that they are necessarily synonomous. Trust can be an expectation based on evidence and prior history. I trust that the sun will come up in the morning. I trust that there will be a Superbowl next year. I trust my wife because I know her character and because she has never been dishonest to me in 18 years.
Religious faith has no historical or evidentiary basis. It has no prior record of reliability.
They aren’t synonyms in all contexts, but they are synonyms in most. We can have faith in our kid to bring home an A on their algebra test even if they have not ever done so in the past due to some change we believe we perceive in how they approach the material. There are many ways we use the word faith. Eliminating it’s usefulness seems to me to be arbitrarily limiting.
That’s not true. People have their faith confirmed all the time. That could just be a matter of correlation not being causation, but it’s still confirmed for the individual in many cases, as many people lose their faith due to not seeing the desired result achieve fruition. Faith doesn’t work via a statistical mean. That’s kind of the entire point of miracles, sometimes events are singular, they only occur once, ever. There is no way to derive a statistical average for them, and if you aren’t there to document it all you have is a bunch of anecdotal evidence. Part of faith is the idea that your ancestors weren’t either hopelessly stupid or lying to you.
I’m glad you realise that. So why did you do it, then?
More semantics. :rolleyes:
They are definitely not synonyms in a religious context, and that’s the only context that matters in this thread. Religious faith =/= trust.
Cite one demonstrable time.
That’s another way of saying it can’t be confirmed as having any justification at all.
There is no proof that a single miracle has ever occurred even once
They could also have been deluded or naive. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins posits a hypothesis that religion might be an accidental result of children having an evolved sense of absolute trust in their parents. Their survival depends on unquestioning trust and obedience to parental authority. Therefore, they place the same amount of trust in what their parents tell them about gods as what their parents tell them about fire. It becomes implanted at an early age that our parents must be telling us the truth, therefore it becomes very hard to divest ourselves of those beliefs and they continue to get passed down as cultural viruses for generaton after generation. They’re neither stupid, nor lying. They just trusted their own parents.
Really, the words “faith” and “trust” are too vague and have too many different usages for this argument to be useful, unless you are more specific.
In my experience Christian religious “faith” is the glorification of belief in the absence of evidence. Christianity, or at least some breeds of it, propounds this sort of faith as highly worthy and virtuous.
Contrastingly, a scientific approach necessarily involves a degree of pragmatic trust: I’d dearly love to repeat every scientific experiment ever completed first hand, but it just isn’t possible. So some degree of trust in other people and the scientific system is necessary.
In short, religious faith is reliance upon belief without evidence as a virtue and scientific trust is reliance upon people and process as an unfortunate but pragmatically necessary practicality.
Saying that religious faith and the trust involved in a scientific approach are the same is like saying that trying to put a fire out with your bare hands is the same as jumping into a fire, because both involve getting burnt.
This is where you go wrong. Science is a process. It has no “acknowledged” ultimate reality. It has an acknowledged best practice process but there is no principle of science which states that there is any particular ultimate reality. The process leads where it leads. If it leads somewhere no one had ever thought it would, that’s fine. Science would still be science. Religion posits that certain things are. Period. Religion has an acknowledged reality that science does not.
Verily. And additionally, a common anti-science argument is to point to paradigm shifts like heliocentricism as “proof” that science is clueless, while conveniently ignoring that religion is far more fluid, with its major premises constantly changing.
As said, prove it. Religious faith is never confirmed; that’s why it’s a religion. If evidence ever showed up, it wouldn’t be a religious belief any more.
There is no ‘point’ to miracles, because they don’t happen. Prove otherwise.
Everyday in this world there are millions of miracles that science can not explain with its materialistic view.
complete remission of a fatal diseases
out of body experiences
near death experiences
spirit guides
angel visits
and many more personal miracles
Your hate for religion has blinded you to the realities of life.
And if you’ll permit me to develop your point, the manner in which science and religion differ in attitude when such shifts or changes occur is illustrative of why one has an “acknowledged ultimate reality” and the other does not.
When there is a paradigm shift of the type you mention, science discards the old theory and adopts the new, while admitting the old one existed: there is no set ultimate reality.
Religion absorbs change but then pretends that the way it is, is the way it always was. Because a religion has at any given time an acknowledged ultimate reality. It would not be permissable to say that what that god says now is not what that god said before.
Millions? Really? I’m going to need a cite for this. A mere million should suffice.
This is a miracle? You think medicine has nothing to do with this? Wow.
What miracles? While the last two are new, you have gone on and on and on about the first two, trotting out your non-evidence and non-cites over and over and over. While I’ll give the obligatory request for cites on the last two, I’m certainly not anticipating anything better than what you usually manage.
How many of these so called miracles can you show are actually miracles? How many of them are just coincidence, cherry picking, confirmation bias, misinterpretation, or any of the other perfectly reasonable explanations that work so much better than the non-explanation of ‘miracle’? You go ahead cite one actual miracle.
Your religion has blinded you to reality.
I didn’t, it’s a common staple of the atheist argument to twist the meaning of the word faith.
There has never been a singular event in all of the universe’s history? It’s impossible that something may happen only once, rather everything that happens MUST cycle back around?
:rolleyes:
Oh please, this is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. You totally avoid the actual point of the argument, and go after semantics, and then get called on it. The word faith has lots of meanings, which did you intend to use?
Hows about you actually try arguing the original point rather than just nit picking the meaning of words?
Are you trying to say that miracles can only happen once each, that they are all unique?
There is no proof that the laws of physics have ever been violated. I think the word “singular” is too vague to be of any use here.
Who said the laws of physics were violated?
I haven’t read past the post I’m responding to yet, so forgive me if I say something already said…
This is demonstrably not true. Science has shown that in most cases it produces fairly good predictibility. Which is to say that is has shown a better than random chance at predicting things on a regular basis. Unfortunately that doesn’t “prove” anything, which is really the point. If we look at a religious belief in prayer healing and then look at a scientific belief in aspirin healing, we can study both of those through experimentation. Of course there is some controversy here, but the point is that the word religion is just an emotional label, and not a factual one.
I am not. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe in any religion that I know of. Which is to say that if my beliefs coincide with a religion it is pure coincidence.
Now to read the rest of the thread!
-Eben