Question about "faith"

[Sal]

Christians don't conflate faith with knowledge. That is largely an atheist thing, as can be observed in this thread alone. When you attend church, and hear the conversations Christians have amongst each other, faith is used to signify trust.

Quotes such as "Faith is belief without evidence and reason" come from atheists.

Whereas quotes such as "Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods" come from Christians.

You're conflating 'trust' and 'faith', not 'faith' and 'knowledge'. 'Faith' is qualitative different from 'knowledge', whereas 'faith' and 'trust' are on the same qualia, but different tiers. You seem to use 'faith' in the same vein as 'trust', interchangeably.

For me to have faith in a god, I would have to disregard evidence and reason about the ability of faith itself. This isn't just some discourse in logic, but a scientific query too - I can test if faith even works in accounting for truth. When I was a Christian, I didn't even question if faith was able to tell me something true or false about my faith in a god. There is the hurdle most theists stop, in my experience, and mainly because the ability to second-guess, to doubt, is intricately suppressed as a 'sin', internally.

You seem to forget that there are a lot of apostates, who once had faith in their particular version of the supernatural. Personally, I genuinely believed in the Christian god - only reason I was put into a path of ceasing in ascribing to faith after a long deliberation was through doubt, resulting from comparing, internally, 2 versions of The Ten Commandments. I now completely disregard the veracity of faith being able to hold any truth value. I still have trust, both from my experience and model of reality, as a result of repeated induction from events.

As for Thomas, he did have evidence, according to the Bible - yet it describes as him should supposedly disregard that - and submit his reason and instead have faith. I cannot possibly do that honestly.

I'm convinced that the only reason I, and a number of other apostates, don't currently believe is because of a fundamental difference between faith and trust, because faith is based on emotion, trust on experience.

Do you think faith has the same function as reason does in revealing a truth? I'm inclined to think that the only way someone can hold onto faith is due to purely emotive conviction, overpowering reason. Case in point, Francis Collins conversion from a trip where he saw a frozen waterfall and remarked about its beauty as being the final tipping point.