A case for Faith
 

Oh lordy - I step tenativly into this forum with one hand on the railing. I have been following Livia Regina's case for Christianity thread - and I simply want to scale it back a bit. Can someone present a case for faith. Can you describe it without using logic or emotion - logical or emotional terms? Does it exist in logic - through logic, or through emotion for you?

Excuse me, how are you defining faith? You have to make certain that you are speaking in common terms.

Faith for me is the trust and fellowship and the confidence that your teammate is there, is on the ball, and is watching your back while you do the same for him.

Faith is not a religion.

Accepting that definition of Faith, is exactly why I have none. You can't count on your fellow human beings.

Conan's father said it best: "For no one - no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts. This you can trust." (points to sword of steel)

And while we're on the topic:

Mongolian General: We have won again. That is good! But what is best in life?
Mongolian General 2: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcon on your wrist, wind in your hair!
Mongolian General: Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!

imo faith is believing in something that has no logical explanation and most often is not tangible

ie my faith in God

Actually this is exactly what I was looking for *makes note to work on being more concise* Descriptions of how YOU view faith.





She killed me with her Brain.

I'd say it was a combination. At first I'd say it started with emotion, because it starts as a desire or yearning for something in which you can believe or rely on. If it proves to be reliable or provides the results you desired, then it becomes more rational, ie When I do x, y happens.

That's not rationality, that's psycho-sematic conditioning.

Faith (in the sense that I think the thread starter meant) is the belief in something despite (or ocassionaly because of) the complete lack of evidence. It is the antithesis of a rational belief which is one held due to positive evidence. So, faith can be considered to be synonomous with "irrational belief".

If the something has evidence for it, then faith is not required, and hence the belief is a rationally held one.

Articles of belief which require faith are often coupled with; ideas promoting faith (i.e. the irational belief in something) as a positive thing, or general lack of evidence being a special form of positive evidence, or both (e.g. Christianity's demonizing of "Doubting Thomas", the man who asked for actual evidence, rather than taking things at face value, or the Conspiracy Theorist who points to complete lack of corroborating evidence as proof of "just how powerful" the conspirators are).


A second meaning of faith is perhaps synonomous with "trust". e.g. "I have faith in my friends". This is based on prior experience with your friends and knowing that they are of good character and so on. Hence "having faith in someone" is not (necessarily) irrational. This is a second, quite seperate, meaning of the word faith.

at least take the capitol C out of Christianity when you say that. Doubt isn't a dirty word...we are exhorted to have faith, but not without a realization that it is not easy. Thomas is actually a pretty sympathetic character, IMO, since he exemplifies the challenge of belief and evangelism. He could not bring his mind to accept life's victory of death, but was going to be responsble for telling people that very soon. it's irony, not condemnation.

find the verse that says "and for this doubt, thomas was smote round the head, and told to go to bed with out supper."

It might take a while, if you know what i mean.

PS: You say irrational like it's a bad thing.

In my experience, religious faith and logic are generally exclusive, making the argument you desire impossible. This does not mean that one is better than the other, to be fair. But religious faith is an undisprovable system, which is one of the reasons why it retains so much power in the face of modern science. Faith creates a layer of order and reason to the events that circle around you, and ensures that the evil will eventually be punished and the good and stoic eventually rewarded. This is a very, very difficult thing to simply break away from.

Faith is an emotional state supported by a fundamental pillar of epistomology, that of Truth delivered by a trusted authority. In my opinion, the historical actions of the messenger (the Christian Church) overshadowed the positive message long ago. And that message is simple--the message of Jesus to just love unconditionally. I believe he existed, and I believe he did spread this message. After that, however, comes the Joseph Campbell mythology of the hero, where the following events of Jesus' life echo across thousands of years of oral history shared across multiple diverse cultures.

You can show them this book, and books like it, and make them read it, but for many of us, we are so inured in and conditioned by the truth of authority that we cannot see the forest for the trees. The best way to convince this group is to remove them from this programmed environment and hope they can learn to question and think independently.

However, many people simply do not want to think for themselves, usually for reasons of psychological convenience, or out of vague fear of displeasing their programmers.

Unfortunately, my argument puts Western religious institution in a decidedly pejorative light, but this is the most diplomatic way I can phrase my perspective. I apologize if I offend.

One example of faith is religion(s) and one's belief in them. I think a case can be made for this type of faith. For some reason us humans find it necessary to make up reasons for our being (religions) and believe in them. Since we evolved with this need to believe in something, perhaps it is(was) necessary for our long term survival that we do so. Of course we are still evolving.

Speak for yourself. I submit that humanity has evolved larger brains, which allow us to hold and consider more information. This also allows us to exercise control over our environment. Those with more control are more likely to propagate and continue.

Religion was a fine way of understanding the world around us 2000 years ago. I'm sure prayer seemed very real to them. That they didn't understand the power of the placebo is hardly surprising.

Unfortunately prayer, and the religious institutions that support it, have plagued humanity after their usefulness have ended. Kind of like a mad appendix that turns into a tumor.

With a little luck, we'll be done with this superstitious nonsense in a few more hundred years.

I don't think I've ever posted in this section before, but the title of the thread caught my attention. I'm currently reading The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel. In the book, he writes about an interview he did with Peter Kreeft, a philosopher who, at the time, was teaching at Boston College.

Here's an excerpt that caught my attention:

"Only in a world where faith is difficult can faith exist. I don't have faith in two plus two equals for or in the noonday sun. Those are beyond question. But Scripture descrbes God as a hidden God. You have to make an effort of faith to find him. There are clues you can follow"
"And if that wern't so, if there were something more or less than clues, it's difficult for me to understand how we could really be free to make a choice about him. If we had absolute proof instead of clues, then you could no more deny God that you could deny the sun. If we had no evidence at all, you could never get there. God gives us just enough evidence so that those who want him can have him. Those who want to follow the clues will."
"The Bible says, 'Seek and you shall find.' It doesn't say everybody will find him; it doesn't say nobody will find him. Some will find. Who? Those who seek. Those whose hearts are set on finding him and who follow the clues."


Dunno if that adds to the discussion or not, but it's a very interesting book on the subject.

Understanding the placebo and feeling its effects are two very different things, with what are we to replace the comfort of religion?

More television? Faster food? Greater consumption?

For all our superior knowledge of the world, what have we done with it?
Even if there's only the slightest chance of injecting the tinyest morsel of wisdom and restraint back into the world. I'd gladly trade a little superstitious nonsense for your celebrity magazines, your reality TV or your consumerisation of the planet.

Religious institutions are just that - institutions - and as such, they are subject to the politics of any organized institution as well as the neccesity to be inclusive and to adapt. What the minister of your church preaches today is far different from what they were preaching two-hundred years ago, and even further from what was taught two-thousand years ago.

True Faith is a pact between one man and God. It is not dependant on what anyone tells you, it is dependant on what you know, on the definition you settle on, on your own pact between God and yourself. In many ways to have faith in God is to have faith in yourself. We can know God in our heart without the bible, the Koran, or even Jesus. And we can certainly know Him without organized religious institutions.

The usefullness of Faith and God will never end. The need for religious institutions may.

In my wedding vows to my wife, I spoke of faith... I explained that I had lost faith in everything else and that the only thing in which I had any faith at that time was her (yes, I know it was a riff on a song by Sting but that was how I felt).

To me faith, like love is born of pure instinct and raw emotion. However, unlike love, I like to think that faith is tempered with the rational mind. Faith must be questioned, probed and tested on a regular basis... otherwise what you are left with is blind faith and that is never a good thing.

The condition of the world shows that man no longer knows how to find knowledge within himself and instead searches outside.


A belief may be larger than a fact.
- Vannevar Bush

Excellent book, excellent quote.

Here's another.

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen."

i'm not sure that strobel really makes that good of arguments in either of his books. he doesn't adequately address counter arguements, and presents a very limited set of evidence.

I take issue with the suggestion CSflim makes, that faith is antithetical to reason. Faith is not rational, I'll give you that, but that doesn't mean that faith is opposed to reason either. Rather, reason points out its own limits, and shows that faith (and not just religious faith) is necessary. Kant and Kierkegaard are good examples. Kant argues that we can't have evidence for the existence of God directly (which I disagree with), but he does argue that we can know God exists, because he is the 'condition of possibility' of ethics. If we consider that, for Kant, reason can explain the empirical world, but not the noumenal world, this is a perfect example of reason pointing the way to faith. For Kierkegaard, reason can be used to point out the limitations of an ethical life, and that what is necessary for an ethical life is a religious life, but it can't get us to a religious life. For that, we need the 'leap of faith'. But in neither example is faith opposed to reason.

Unfortunately I was not referring to myself since I am basicly agnostic I guess. I was just answering the original question and making a case for faith since so many of my fellow human beings seem to believe in one religion or another. As a species most of us must have a need for this.

How about the simple recognition that there is no comfort to be had? The world is a cold, empty place, and all your songs and dances don't matter.

I think you might be confusing biological and chemical dependencies for philosophical answers. The crack head feels comfort from smoking some crack, but that doesn't mean crack is the answer to life's troubles.

No, I'll certainly admit that reason and science haven't answered all questions, but in the absence of such answers we don't have to substitute "faith". Why can't you people just accept that we don't know those things yet. Speculate all you want, write great fiction books hypothesizing what may be. But when you begin to allow those speculations to control your actions you are following the path of the insane.

Which of course assumes that some particular ethical life is a good thing, or that there are such things as good and evil.

Bob: So in order to find god I have to accept that he exists?
Nick: Yes.
Bob: Well, how can I accept that he exists?
Nick: Because I told you so.
Bob: Oh, ok, well how did you find him?
Nick: I accepted that he exists.
Bob: Oh, ok, well how did you accept that he exists?
Nick: Jim told me.

Wisdom? Restraint? What religion preaches these things?

Would that be the Catholics that hide child molestors?
Would that be the Muslims who kill jews and chrsitians and buddhists and atheists?

Every religion is about us vs. them.

Do you believe in god?
No.
BANG!

Do you believe in god?
Yes.
Do you believe in my god?
No.
BANG!

The history of religion is one of persecution, genocide, superstition, civil war and oppression. The sooner we give that nonsense up and start behaving rationally and civilly toward each other the better.

You're damn right I do.

Yes it is a cold hard place, and no, songs and dances don't - but if the faithful are comforted - let them be comforted. If the faithful feel it necessary to feed the poor and cure the sick out of charity, then let them feed the poor and cure the sick. Whether it matters or not is of no importance - what does matter is that faith provides a foundation on which people can strengthen themselves, and through their stength feel more able to help others.

No, the history of nations, governments, tribes, and power is one of persecution, genocide, superstition, civil war and oppression. Religion is a side issue - the Crusades were not about Christianity vs Islam - they were about political control of an important and economically important asset. The people sent there were told it was for religious reasons, and may not have gone otherwise. This is an example of religion being bent to political purposes, but it was not religion, or faith itself that was at fault.

The same thing is happening today, but the ideology being used to justify the action is 'National Security', 'War or Terrorism', 'Axis of Evil', 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'. Which do you prefer? Nationalism, or Religiosity? Both are irrational, both lead people to their deaths, and irrationality will continue to exist. If you remove religion, then the same irrationality will express itself somewhere else somehow.

I would agree with you to an extent. Much gets unfairly blamed on religion. Yet you seem to imply that religion and politics are seperate things. Do you believe this?

Of course not, but then let's not prevent the crack head from scoring some crack, yes?

As long as the religious kooks don't bother others its just a sad waste of resources and time. It's when religious folk get it in their heads to beat down a gay man, or castrate young women that I get nervous.

And granted, nations and tribes and all that shit play a part too. They are just as irrational as religion. The sooner it's all dispensed with the better.

Then we'll just have to deal with that when it comes up. If we are able to eliminate religion and people begin killing each other over football teams, then maybe we should reconsider wasting billions of dollars watching men run into each other.

So after you've banned everything that allows people to express thier irrationality, what is left? At least religion provides a reasonably stable framework in which people can indulge themselves. Beating down gays or castrating (circumcising?) young women is probably not limited to religious beliefs but is a cultural thing. I've heard of worse being done within gang culture (which I'm assuming is not a particularly religious one)

Yes, there is pure religion - the faith that someone has that is a subjective, emotional and very personal thing.

And then there is the way religion has been sponsored, endorsed and redirected by politicians in order to provide themselves with higher authority. Whether it's Egyptian God-Kings, or The God sanctioned Kings and Queens of Europe, to the Emperors of Rome who had the favour of their gods bestowed upon them, to Moses. All these leaders linked themselves to the authority of unearthly powers/beings in order to solidify their own authority.

Well I would have to disagree with you there. Religion always has been intimately tied to political power. This is why the idea of "seperation of church and state" is something which has to be actively fought for, rather than something which just happens naturally. However further discussion of this would is just way beyond the scope of this thread.

Agreed CSFilm, it has always been tied to political power. However, it is also possible for me to have a religious experience (not necessarily one of a specifically Christian, Muslim or any other established religion, but something different) whilst isolated on a desert island. But I only want to say that in the hope that it clarifies what I said before. Nuff said.

Dude, I am totally not for banning anything, including religion or drugs. My hope is that people will recognize that such things are meaningless and won't be addicted to either one.

It's ok to sometimes express yourself irrationally. To dream, or write or sing. It's not harming others. But when you ascribe reality to those things, when you begin to believe that the nice story of the man who built an ark to save all the animals was real and that it has some relevance to how you get on in society, you can't expect to be taken any more seriously than the guy who thinks he's the reincarnated spirit of Napoleon.

I couldn't agree more. But Napoleon might be an OK guy - I've enjoyed the company of many people who's ideas were frankly barmy. But they were all people who responded to human things in a human way. Belief doesn't turn someone into something else, it's just the narrative they use to explain their life. If you make friends with a nut-job book-bashing Baptist fundamentalist, you're still friends - just as if you make friends with an equally nut-job sado-masochist with a castration fetish and a face full of piercings. Both of them will react to your friendship in the same way. Yes both of them will be laughable and absurd at different times, but then, so are we all.

Unless Napoleon decides that you are part of the marauding Russian army and decides to kill you, just like the religious folk decide that you must be the work of the devil, and kill you.

Actually I think they are probably people who respond to outside forces in an irrational way. Not every crazy person is a threat who should be locked up, that's true. It's one thing to tolerate non-homicidal religious experience until you can wean people off of it, and it's another thing entirely to encourage people to think in such a way.

y'all have your own discussion, so i'll just say a few things and back out again.

Imagine me cussing at you. Thanks. Thanks for using insane as a way to put other people down. Thanks for not being the least bit tolerant. And thanks most of all, for bringing personal insult in to this discussion.

Thanks a lot.

There are non-rational numbers you know. I'm mostly joking, but really...i think you've deified logic. I only wish you'd introduce self-examination in to your faith. honestly, i can tell you that any religion can suffer from unlimited confidence in a founding principle, no matter how just or right that thing might be.

I was going to recommend this book too. :thumbsup:

Master Shake -- Well, first of all, how would you like it if I said you were going to burn in hell and I'd be there to roast marshmellows? Don't insult Christians; just like I realize there are many good, smart, intellectually responsible atheists whom I just happen to disagree with, you should realize that there are many good, smart, intellectually responsible Christians, with whom you just happen to disagree with. If you want to argue, fine, but the insults don't do anyone any good.

In between insults, you write: Yeah, I suppose. I pretty much just assume the existence of good and evil and can't really argue for them.

On Religion and Politics: Not sure how we got here, but here's my .02$ Of course religion is political; all organizations are political in a broad sense. In the narrower sense, of course religion is always political. Even the withdrawal of the hermit or the monk is political. But Christendom has had good effects on the political sphere as well as the bad. Sure you have the crusades, but you also have democracy and the university, and I'm not sure that any of us are wise enough to balance out the scales here. Aside from claims about what Christians really believe and what some people have used Christianity to justify... But this is a bit off-topic, I suppose.

You're crediting Christianity for democracy?

How would you react if I told you Santa Claus wasn't coming to your house this year?
Since there is no such person as Santa Claus, or such place as hell, I can't imagine it would affect you in any way.

Right, you assumed them because your parents or the school or whatever told you so, just like the Nazi's accepted the jews were bad because they were told so. Faith is the absence of reason and thought and is almost always a fallacious appeal to tradition or some supposed authority figure.

I think the point that asaris is making is that it is possible to debate these kinds of things without being insulting (or at least by phrasing your opinion to keep the 'insult-level' to a minimum).

For me, Faith is experiencial and somewhat subjective. It is also something that 'works' and by such is further validated. Paradoxically, it cannot be measured or analyzed as we are wont to do in the west.

Well said Lebell, I couldn't agree more. :)

I don't think it's just you, that's what faith is, and that's why it's so dangerous.

http://www.enel.ucalgary.ca/~camp/photos/misc/troll.jpg

And with Godwin's Law, I declare this discussion done.

Thanks for playing, everybody. Just remember, hyperbolic references to National Socialism are not your friend.

Faith is not inherently good or evil, any more than science is. How someone uses faith is what makes it "dangerous", much like how science can be used for "dangerous" means. Faith can be used as a reason for genocide, and faith can be used as a reason to devote your life to feeding the hungry. Science, in the same token, can be used to invent new ways to kill people, and it can also be used to discover new medicines to keep people alive.

If I hand a man a hammer, and that man uses it to bash someone in the head, do we blame the hammer? Do we say that the hammer is evil and dangerous? Do we blame the carpenter's union that the man is a member of? The hammer, in the hands of a madman, is a dangerous weapon. In the hands of a responsible, caring human, that same hammer could be used to build shelters for the underprivleged. The hammer, itself, is not good or evil. It's how the hammer is used.

Of course not. But if you hand a person a religious system that teaches that women should be subservient to men, gays should be killed, blacks should be slaves and it's all right to molest children then yes, the religion is evil and dangerous (of course assuming that those are bad things).

Hammers and science are tools and methods of doing things or acquiring information. Religion is an end-result statement of the way you should live your life based on the written word of men who have been dead for 2000 years.

I've been attending my church for over 15 years, and I've never been taught any of those things.

EDIT: I thought this was a discussion of faith, not the religious systems in place. I'm talking about the hammer, while you're talking about the carpenter's union. Apples and oranges. Now I understand why I stopped reading this forum.
Good day, sir.

Yes, yes I do. The notion that all men/people/whatever were created equal comes from Christianity and nowhere else. Every society, from the Greek to the Viking to the Indian to the Chinese, had some sort of caste system, and more than that, never challenged or question the idea that people were inherently unequal. I'm not saying we've always practiced what we preach, but what we preach has had an effect.

Eh? Greek democracies (ala polis) date from ~500BC. These are the ones we know about.

Arguments about all society's good originating with Christianity remind me of Chekov. "Everything was invented in Russia!"

Common sense says the earliest hominid tribes needed some form of behavior standard to maintain their cohesion and the advantages of a community. Soon after the first thunderstorm sent tribespeople running for caves, Chief Oomba appointed the mumbling guy with funny hair as community shaman, explainer of all weird things. Consider the stability and advantages this provides a primitive society and its power structure. We've grown in wisdom and variety but the mystical remains a valued explanation to those overwhelmed by complexity.

Faith is, one might think, a rational response to an irrational revelation.

We cannot, I think, rationalize the particular valididty of anything as an object of faith, we can, at least partially, rationalize the need for faith.

When speaking of faith it is, as others have mentioned, important to keep seperate the social church from individual faith. (in God or something likewise) By that I only mean that the failure of the institutional church to better the lot of mankind is not a failure of faith per se, but a failure of men to overcome greed and desire for power.

Much as communist russia didn't disprove communism per se, it disproved a tyrannical 'dictatorship of the proletariat' -- for all anyone knows communism may still be the way.

God is something that is undetectable by any experiement and more or less ruled out of science from the beginning. Science is a natural study and God is supernatural by definition. Therefore, I think that faith in God's existence is irrational. At the very least the initial 'leap of faith' has to be an irrational move.

Well, a lot of value is placed on rationality in our society, so why would people do something irrational? I think people do it (often subconciously) because it gives them purpose and because it makes the world seem less cold.

I don't think it's very unlike how I convince myself that I have free will. I have a gut feeling that I have free will, and life seems kind of pointless without it. So, I tell myself, 'I can stop worrying about free will and just believe that I've got it.' Afterall, everybody knows what a quagmire it is to get free will out of a natural perspective on the world, but let's not go there in this thread. Suffice it to say that when I think about it, I have a hard time convincing myself in a rational way that I have free will.

So why have faith? Have faith if life sucks without it. I'm sure that's not what a lot of people who want to hear a 'case for faith' would like to hear, but that's my answer. People are looking for a concrete, rational reason to have faith, but I think that's asking for something inherently impossible. I think a lot of people have spent time trying to think God into existence, but they are usually just playing word games. Besides, just because you can make a logical argument for something's existence doesn't mean it actually exists. You can't think something into existence. If you want to prove something exists, you've got to detect it, and in God's case it has been ruled out from the beginning. Whatever new experiements we do, we will always describe the data with a theory that does not include God.

Have faith if it makes your life better. Perhaps God will reward your devotion when you're dead. Then again maybe he won't. Even if he doesn't then at least you did everything you could to make this life as good as it can be. I guess my argument is kind of like Pascal's wager.

First, I never said all of society's goods originating with Christianity. That would be an absurd claim, and I try not to make absurd claims. Second, there is a huge difference between the Greek democracies and modern democracies, the first being that the Greek democracies weren't democracies. They were oligarchies; rule by a single class (land-owning males) over the others. This, in itself, doesn't save my claim. After all, many modern democracies started out the same way. But another difference is in the rhetoric. From the beginning, modern democracies proclaimed the rights of all people, and this led relatively quickly to all people having, at least on paper, the same right. Think about it this way -- in the US, it only took 150 years for all citizens to have the vote (again, at least on paper), and only 200 for more or less equal rights for all to be inaugurated. Not only did this never happen in a Greek 'democracy', there was nowhere even the slightest hint from any side that slaves or women should have the vote. That's a huge difference. At the beginning of modern democracy, it may have been unequal, but there was a nascent equality in principle that has led towards an increasing recognition of 'human rights'. And this equality in principle of all people comes from scripture, and, I'm maintaining, nowhere else.

Why nowhere else? Well, it's really pretty obvious that the statement "all people are equal" is false, or at best meaningless. Are you as good as me at math? Am I as good as you at singing? And how would we ever add up all these things, properly weighted, to find that we are, at the end of it, equal? But Christianity teaches that "In Christ there is no slave nor free, no male nor female [...] for all are one in Christ Jesus."