(September 22, 2020 at 11:41 am)The Grand Nudger 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.
(September 22, 2020 at 12:59 pm)Simon Moon Wrote: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.
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post
always working on cleaning my windows- me regarding Johari
always working on cleaning my windows- me regarding Johari