If evidence for god is in abundance, why is faith necessary?

[ComradeMeow]

What is your definition of faith? I am all ears to hear it.

Also I used the same definition in my post before. I am merely addressing the amount of trust people have in the world despite how obviously dangerous it is. Even people like Dillahunty and Dawkins address this and they get no flak from other atheists. Everybody has or does exhibit some faith in the things they do. 

How can faith be this bothersome toward you? It is a word and I am using it without the baggage of religion. If I called atheism a faith that would be idiotic since it makes no claim or shows no trust without reason. But the fact that people have faith in something not religious really seems to disturb you and beg the question do you even know anything about theism or atheism.

You think because I am an antitheist I have to show irrational hate towards theists? 

I used to be a Muslim and left for that exact reason. The only reason I am an antitheist instead of an atheist is because of the serious danger one religion places the whole world in and as to how that bothers you baffles me. 

You just stated earlier that atheists have no faith and that faith is somehow a religion. How do you expect me to take you seriously?


I will grant the possible fact that maybe you are not reading my posts clearly or that I am not reading your posts clearly. BUT please clarify your position so I do not end up hating you for unfair reasons that could easily be solved. I don't wont to call you a troll if one of us misunderstood the other. 

I think I see the misunderstanding here. I'm using the same definition you outlined in your previous post, but you're making an extreme exaggeration (as I already pointed out) and making a false equivalency between faith as an everyday thing and the trust we put in things based on evidence. I don't need to have faith in gravity for it to keep my ass firmly planted on the ground. We have satellites and all kinds of shit to help us figure out if there's a meteor coming to blow our planet to bits. We take what precautions we can afford to ensure that we can sleep at night without our houses being broken into by strangers and our throats slit while we're at our most vulnerable, and we can put trust in the fact that the odds of something like that happening are about as good as winning the lottery (just for illustration, it takes faith to believe you'll WIN the lottery, not to believe you won't win), and even if someone did break in, they're far more likely to just be there to steal shit and not just randomly harm someone for their sick pleasure.

So if you're saying everyone is motivated by completely irrational fears, you're bogus. We're aware of what can happen and how likely those things are to happen and how to deal with them accordingly. There's no reason to think it's MORE likely for that kind of shit to happen than not, if you manage to survive to be more than one day old. I'm 32, have been hit by reckless drivers while on my bike three times and walked away from each. I've only just taken to wearing a helmet because this most recent time is the only one where I've been injured severely enough to need to go to a hospital. And I've continued to ride the bike ever since. I have ZERO trust in drivers not to hit me but I don't have any other way of getting around and I'm extremely cautious because I understand how moronic people are the second they get behind the wheel of a car. But faith? No, dear, everything about that is EXTREMELY grounded in facts, reasonable expectations and statistics. Just like everything else in life that doesn't revolve around things like religion and other woo, the only places where faith is involved. So please, don't go throwing that word around like it doesn't mean what you seem to be able to describe.

I am not saying this at all. In my first post I was using faith in the most basic of terms. I was using at a belief that people cling to without very good reasons and I compared it to the possibility if not inevitable future that a meteorite will collide with earth one day, granted we don't stop it by some means. I then compared it to the fact that we do not change our lives on the basis of faith either. You already made a comparable point acknowledging the trust we put into our safety. 

I never addressed irrational fears and their motivational effects though. Nor have I ever claimed that everybody experiences faith all throughout their lives. I said the opposite, I said earlier that nobody changes their behavior even though the things they trust the most only are trusted on the basis of faith. Most religious people and even atheists do not realize the amount of faith they put into things that are for the most part bad ideas, political parties are an obvious example of this. 

Also the analogy you have made with your biking incident is another such example of the amount of faith you put into the probability of you not having an accident. You gave up that faith obviously and began wearing a helmet which I give props to you for doing so and you have obviously increased your skepticism of driver's ability to know what they are doing. But saying that faith is a religious concept is ignoring what the word has always meant. Look at how the word is even used in everyday language and see its lack of religious connotation. 

Also you mentioned facts and faith which can't be compared because faith is how a person feels towards something. I can say, "I have faith in your ability to write beautiful poetry" but never would you hear me or anyone say, "I have facts that you are great in your ability write beautiful poetry." You keep giving the word faith an odd religious context which I am not using nor do I think it is appropriate to make it a religious word. I use spirit in the original context and never religious hence whenever I say, "that is spiritually uplifting." I am only using the word in context to life and and not some ethereal floating consciousness.

I personally am a very paranoid person which is why I have a massive hangup about faith though. I am the kind of person that can plan every detail of my life for a whole week and never stray once. The only thing I can leave to faith is my current relationship and the hope I have that I will never be departed from my significant other.