Religion's affect outside of religion

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Ah, that. Shifting sands. Gotcha.

So what you're trying to suggest here is that a "faithful" person is one who believes so strongly that not even reality can shake his belief.

Nice. If reality constitutes a "storm" against your "faith", which you feel you must resist, then you're in a cult. Congratulations.

No. A believer has little need or room for faith. One believe, because he knows what the truth is. I don't need faith anymore, because I have been given opportunity to believe, and I took it. Belief differs from faith because belief is tangibly based acknoweledgement resulting in action of what one knows to be true. Faith is believeing without anything tangible to believe in, and acting on what they want to be true..

That is the difference between jumping out of an airplane with a bed sheet in hopes of making some sort of a parachute on the way down, and Jumping out with a parachute that you know works, and understanding why it works, thus putting you in a position of a working belief that your chute will open and do it's job.

If you believe you had belief, and it could not stand up to basic rational thought.. I hate to be the one to tell you it was only faith in your system of belief, and again according to Christ that belief is the 'house' that the winds and rain tested and came down on itself. If what you know to be true can whether any storm then that belief can be solidified as Truth.

Is that cultish behavior in of itself? (Belief in what you know to be true) Only if your looking to hit the panic stop button on this particular conversation. (It's easier to label someone crazy than it is to go line by line and prove that they are using their own content.)

Cultish behavior is easy to identify in that one believes in something but has no reason for belief. They believe because the cult believes.. (which btw sounds more like some of your peers who believe in science, yet they do not understand a fraction of what they believe in.) My beliefs are based on what God has done for me over the last 20+ years. Not because someone told me what to believe. But because I have personally witnessed and experienced what was laid out in the bible. Most of which happened before I knew what it was I was looking for. It wasn't till years later that I could verify what I had experienced. Again, non of which was 'church'/cult taught.

Yeah, except I was a scientist. I have a degree and part of a Master's in science. And most of us do understand science, from what I've seen posted here. Yes, part of my Southern Baptist upbringing was teaching me that my faith and beliefs were based on solid science, except I later found out they were just making shit up that was in no way scientific, and trying very hard to pass it off as reality. That's what I mean by "conflicts with testable reality". Even rudimentary testing shows that the beliefs that I felt so confident in (such as the Prophecy of the Destruction of Tyre and the story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood) are easy to prove false, if and only if you are willing to be honest when you look at the real facts.  That's the catch. My belief system said to reject what my brain told me when confronted with "man's knowledge" or "the world", and to cling more tightly to certainty in my beliefs. But I am not a naturally dishonest person, and could not in good conscience do so. 

When confronted with the problems of the amount of rainfall it would take to cause the Great Flood, you instead chose to talk about bird blood in your next post, and then quote the findings of one of the greatest frauds in pseudo-archaeological history (and that's really saying something... there have been some doozies!), instead of facing a glaring flaw in your basic ideology. That's what's known as intellectual dishonesty.

As far as your arbitrary division between faith and "knowledge"-based beliefs, when it comes to your religion, I think I'll let the other (honest) Christians here, few though they may be, tear you apart over that silly little bit of nonsense. Most of them find faith not only important, but critical to their beliefs, and would no doubt be more offended by your claim anything I could say to them.