Oh ye of little trust in chairs, why did you doubt me?

(September 22, 2020 at 1:54 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Oh ye of little trust in chairs, why did you doubt me?

Perfect.

(September 22, 2020 at 11:41 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote:

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(September 22, 2020 at 11:20 am)tackattack Wrote: @The Grand Nudger @Fake Messiah @Sal - I have no problems disbelieving in fairies and unicorn, not from their lack of physical-ness, but because I haven't experienced them. If I woke up tomorrow and (without psycho-reactive drugs) started seeing faeries floating around or unicorns galloping, I would have to seriously rethink my beliefs on faeries and unicorns. Faith IS mundane, and that's the point, we all use it day-to-day, unless you're defining it as "religious faith" or "blind faith", which some people here are.

Just as atheist say they believe in one less God than I do, I just have faith in one more thing than they do.

You came in a bit late, but we've been discussing whether trusting that a chair will hold your ass and faith in god are the same thing.  I suggest that they're not, that the latter is much more than the former.  That I don't have or do whatever you have or do about god, to chairs.  One is mundane, and the other, as you note, is not.

Every christian in this thread has insisted otherwise, and I can only conclude that every christian in this thread has an impoverished faith if they only get what they get out of a chair from their god.  I'll say it again, something about bickering with atheists makes you people swirl the drain.  Faith, which is apparently nothing more than what I think about chairs, has broken you.

Doesn't do that to everyone.

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Sorry for the tardiness and the lack of free time to share, it's been busy. It's a shame I don't feel that broken as you ascribe. The faith for a descriptive definition between a chair and God (for me) is the same thing, trust from experience. Descriptively they are the same. Prescriptively, you use the appropriate tools to measure. The mundanity of the chair being a physical object means a different set of prescriptive criteria than the spiritual God. It takes less faith for something "mundane" like a tree or chair than it does for the intangible, but the description of faith is the same.

(September 22, 2020 at 12:59 pm)Simon Moon Wrote:

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(September 22, 2020 at 11:20 am)tackattack Wrote: You can take spirituality to any culture, you can explain what it is for, you can teach cultures that don't share your views of spirituality. It's the very definition of Church outreach and missionary work.

Yes, one could do the above. But you continually miss the point.

But that still does not get anywhere near to the kind of demonstration that the chair exists. All these cultures would have to go on is your word for it. If they came to you with their version of a sitting implement, they could show you it exists, and how it works, and why it is trustworthy. If they came to with their spiritual/god beliefs, they would be completely unable to convince you of their god's existence.

Quote: I can show you how trusting in God has supported my life and improved it. It is in the same ballpark, it's just not a materialist only ball park, although all are welcome.

I see you didn't respond to my friend's drastic improvement in his life that he credits to his conversion of Hinduism in post #227. Why should my friend's claim that Hinduism was the cause of his drastic improvement of life (quitting drugs, stopping petty crime, turnaround in career, and family life) be dismissed as nothing to do with the existence of the Hindu gods, but your life improvements be credited with the existence of the Christian god?

Please demonstrate that some non-materialist realm exists, with any where near the kind of reliability that a chair can be demonstrated to exist.

Quote:Secondly you do have faith in those things. You just refuse to call it faith because of it's connotations and your bias. It's very hard to drive a vehicle without faith in your eyes.

Still no.

I have reasonable expectations (not faith) in those things, because they have constantly demonstrated their reliability to convey reality. I have tons of evidence for their reliability, not least of which, is I am still alive.



L

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Sorry if I missed that post, I did come in late as GN pointed out. If your friend attributes the betterment of his life to Hinduism, then that's great for him and his Hindu gods. I didn't dismiss it. If I was Hindu I would probably believe in those Gods as well. When I was wiccan I believed in the great mother. In my case, my limited understanding of God, within my worldview is very reliable, hence my belief. I agree that demonstrating the spiritual is hard, by substance, but not by content.

So you define faith as "reasonable expectation that conveys reality". You have to inject reasonable and limit reality because of your materialist view, hence all the demanding physical evidence for a spiritual truth. If our definitions of reality included spiritual and we shared an agreement on the bar for reasonable, we would have the same definition of faith. We don't agree on those prescriptive definitions, hence the impasse.

I hope I'm speaking to the current topic, and addressing both of ya'lls point, I apologize if I'm behind or if I missed something.

(September 22, 2020 at 2:33 pm)Sal Wrote:

(September 22, 2020 at 1:54 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Oh ye of little trust in chairs, why did you doubt me?

Perfect.

Agreed, it is perfect.

"Why did you doubt me."

The pronoun me informs you that the proposer being doubted is Jesus. His proposition was that Peter could walk on water. His merit was that he himself was walking on water demonstrating his proposition.

"'Lord, if it’s you,' Peter replied, 'tell me to come to you on the water.' 'Come,' said Jesus" (Matthew 14:28).

Finally, notice that what caused Peter to lose faith in Jesus was fear, not reason. Emotions are the enemy of faith; and faith protects reason from emotions. Or as C.S. Lewis put it: "The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other."

"But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, 'Lord, save me!'” (Matthew 14:30)

(September 22, 2020 at 3:04 pm)tackattack Wrote: Sorry for the tardiness and the lack of free time to share, it's been busy. It's a shame I don't feel that broken as you ascribe. The faith for a descriptive definition between a chair and God (for me) is the same thing, trust from experience. Descriptively they are the same. Prescriptively, you use the appropriate tools to measure. The mundanity of the chair being a physical object means a different set of prescriptive criteria than the spiritual God. It takes less faith for something "mundane" like a tree or chair than it does for the intangible, but the description of faith is the same.

If you say so.  Christian faith is a thing like a thing about chairs.  Nothing more to it.  The christians have spoken.

I don't care what your reasons for believing in anything are, chairs or gods, and have no interest in bickering with you about them. I'm just surprised at how tiny christian faith gets when it seeks to engage in some doomed argument to that effect. Mountain mover? Life changing? Endowed with the fullness of divine grace? Pertaining to a sense of the numinous? Born again? Nah, none of that. Just chairs.

The types of christians I have to deal with on a daily basis would conclude, as I have, that both you and john have a dead faith. If this really is all that your christian faith is, and there really is no difference between your christian faith and your whatever about a chair, then I'd suggest the same thing to you that I did to him pages ago. Get right with jesus, grow your faith.

(September 22, 2020 at 4:12 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: The types of christians I have to deal with on a daily basis would conclude, as I have, that both you and john have a dead faith.

I doubt it; but I understand why it's necessary to turn us into outliers.

Funny and pathetic at the same time. Is faith so weak that it cannot stand scrutiny? If Christians really believed in the veracity of faith, its strength, they would have no fear of doubt. This latest diversion is just yet another example of how tiny, ineffective and inconsequential that faith is, in an obvious rehashing of meaning. At this pace, Christian faith will be smaller than a proton in less than a week, and they will rehash the same old tired defenses of their faith rephrased into the field of quantum mechanics.

Why, don't you know? Electron spin is the same as the divinity of Jesus, and I have the same faith in electrons and their properties as I have in god. /s

Who is really fearful here? The atheist who wields reason as a tool for understanding the world to the best of his ability, or is it the theist who excuses reason, excuses semantics, excuses meanings of words, even excuses language itself at the altar of his faith? Fear has replaced the Christians' ability to reason, all thanks to because he can't accept that his faith might not just do what it does for others.

(September 22, 2020 at 3:05 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: "The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other."

This makes a lot of sense to me. I hadn't thought about it this way before. 

I have come to think of morality in much the same way. Since it's pretty much guaranteed that human beings will make irrational choices when upset or tempted, morality works as a kind of rational structure or overlay, that we use to counter those irrational urges or poorly-justified decisions. It's natural to want to punch someone when you're angry, or swipe something if you really want it, but morality is a cool bit of reason which (we hope) prevents this.

So I can see faith operating in the same way. 

If you call your girlfriend and she doesn't answer for a while, a jealous or neurotic man might react strongly. Emotion and imagination would persuade him that his girlfriend is up to no good. But if he has faith in her, his reason will remind him that he's jumping to conclusions, and he should wait and see. Naturally, trust may be broken or misplaced, but if we are correct in judging that faith is warranted, it acts as a counter to irrationality. 

It's easy for me to see this in regard to people. As we've seen, many people will deny that faith in God is justified in the same way that faith in one's girlfriend may be justified. 

But it's a reasonable and useful definition of faith.

(September 22, 2020 at 6:02 pm)Sal Wrote: Fear has replaced the Christians' ability to reason, all thanks to because he can't accept that his faith might not just do what it does for others.

The danger with saying faith is something contrary to reason is that you start to believe it. It is propaganda eloquently designed to make a religious opponent seem beyond reach and beneath consideration.

(September 22, 2020 at 6:24 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(September 22, 2020 at 6:02 pm)Sal Wrote: Fear has replaced the Christians' ability to reason, all thanks to because he can't accept that his faith might not just do what it does for others.

The danger with saying faith is something contrary to reason is that you start to believe it. It is propaganda eloquently designed to make a religious opponent seem beyond reach and beneath consideration.

I've repeatedly asked what faith does. No one has answered so far. I don't expect an answer from you any time soon either. Tremble in fear.