Do you see any benefits to religious faith?

[Arkilogue]

"Faith" comes from "fides" which means literally to trust or to believe.  There's nothing about spirits fucking reaching out to anybody.  But "having faith" means you hold the belief, and since it's not a logical belief, it's one based on either authority or feeling.

In no universe does it mean what you want it to mean.

As for your balls. . . although I'm old, I'm still worried there's always some danger in choking on small objects-- so I'll pass.

Oh does it? Was the NT originally written in Latin? Nope. Faith comes from pistis.


http://welldesignedfaith.net/tag/basics/

Hebrews 11:1 is the most famous definition of faith in the Bible: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Here, and in most other places translated as “faith”, the Greek word used is πίστις (pistis) or one of its related forms. This word can be translated as faith, belief, trust, confidence, or proof. Looking at secular Greek sources, Herodotus used it to refer to a pledge or military oath[1].

Other secular authors such as Aeschylus, Democritus, and Appian used the word to denote evidence from the senses or from eyewitness testimony, or proof of intent deduced from observed actions [2]. The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo used the term pistis in his writings 156 times with the sense of evidence in over 50% of those instances [3]. Aristotle used the term to describe various “proofs” for convincing someone of your case through reason and logic [4]. This word for faith sounds like it was often used by secular sources as a justified belief based on observation, logical or philosophical reasoning, or testimony and solemn oaths. But we can dig a little deeper yet. The word pistis is derived from the Greek word πείθω (peitho), meaning “to persuade”.

Are you persuaded blindly by any assertion you hear, or by evidence, by sound reasoning,and by common sense? It makes sense then that Aristotle would use pistis to describe the proofs of the art of rhetoric (persuasion). It seems that Biblical faith is anything but blind. Rather, it is “God’s divine persuasion” [5]. It is also interesting that the word translated in Hebrew 11:1 as “conviction” in the NASB translation is ἔλεγχος (elegchos) which means proof, and is derived from ἐλέγχω (elegcho), a verb meaning “to convince with solid, compelling evidence; to expose, refute or prove wrong.” [6] Faith could be said to be God’s divine persuasion of the reality of the supernatural things we can’t observe with our natural senses.



In this universe, It means exactly what I have asserted it means, backed up with many biblical verse that show contextual usage and from scholars that uphold the same assertion.


Your kung fu is not strong.