Question about "faith"

[Sal]

I've repeatedly asked what faith does. No one has answered so far.

This is a very strange thing to say. John has described what faith is, for him, very clearly. In my last post I restated that in my own words. 

And you fail again. I didn't expect anything less. There's no action or doing that faith does, that can't be matched in greater measure by reason. Faith is the clown makeup of reason, in this regard.

A wise man once said that the easiest person to fool is oneself, and it looks as though you are doing it.

If you really believe that - which I expect you do not, surprise me - then you would realize that this applies to everyone, you included. Me, you, everyone. We have an internalized bias about our own convictions, which makes introspection difficult. The greater the hold of that conviction, harder it is to realize any possible faults in those convictions. Or even entertain possible faults. The way faith works, as apostates know so well intuitively, is a conviction so rooted in the psyche, that any question about its validity is for many a believer, even theistic scholars, a personal attack on their identity as humans. That's not a bug, but a feature of faith.

The reason Richard P. Feynman used that phrase in his Caltech commencement address in 1974, is because people have pet theories that they would disregard evidence that would disprove any inductive reasoning of a pet theory. Don't believe me?

Read it for yourself.

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

At this point I think there are two arguments that could be made concerning the definition of faith that's been given.

1) In people's psychology faith doesn't really operate in the way described. 

2) Faith, as described, is warranted in some cases but not in the case of God.

1) is closer to the truth about faith.

2) is a diversion.

A theist has faith in god. I don't doubt that. And the theist can write books about what that faith supposedly means for him. This is not the contention. The contention, as stated, does it work for stuff outside their heads, that can be explained as extant of their faith? Clearly theists are motivated by faith. That isn't the contention, it motivates them to charity, missionary work, helping people because their religious teachings tell them to and so on, but you can find this in any religion, as well as the inverse, indoctrination, torture, murder "because it is right", holy wars and genocide. Again, this isn't the contention.

Faith is best understood through the lense of psychology, from the onset, as asserting things with no prior knowledge or misattribution. The most common & ancient of which is the agenticity associated with faith. Like, when experiencing a rustle in some bushes, and immediately thinking someone is there, even to the point of being convinced someone is in there, rustling those bushes.

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Have you ever heard about the notion of a parasitic concept, in language parasites (phorontology)? A very simple demonstration of such a parasitic concept, with a single word, is 'hole'. You can only device a model of a hole by its surrounding structure, "hole in a table", "hole in a wall", the word 'hole' together in sentences with tables and walls can only be described by a form of modulation of tables and walls - it's simple to see why too, when you remove tables and walls ... where does the 'hole' go?

Faith is a 'hole' in the same manner. You can't have faith without reason, any more you can't have minds without brains. As I, in an esoteric manner, yes, have described in detail and explored in different venues, faith is a parasite in your mind. It feeds of you and lives inside you in the same manner any other parasite would in the natural world from its host. Even much so, that the parasite in its efforts to propagate needs other minds to survive down the generations.

The reason Richard Dawkins uses the concepts of memes through the lense of cultural virus, with its own mechanisms for propagation and survival, is because they're so apt in explaining why they are transmitted in the first place.

Now, a mind parasite isn't necessarily harmful. For most people, with enough tolerance, a mind parasite like faith merely adds an unnecessary non-functioning mental abstraction in their minds that they think explains some aspects of reality, somewhat, which has the appearance of being a model but with no corollary in reality. The mind thinks this parasite explains something, despite any evidence to the contrary about some aspect of reality. The problem with any such parasite is that they're well secluded from detection, and even have mechanisms in their conceptual structure that combat detection attempts, they're cloaked.

I'm reminded of a quote in a TBS game called SMAC that used something Sun Tzu said about military strategy:

“If I determine the enemy’s disposition of forces while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it.”

— Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”