Abortion not allowed

[Esquilax]

I'd just be happier without the equivocation between faith based on reasonable expectations, and faith based on absolutely nothing. It's the false dichotomy I object to; if you want to define faith as a lack of certainty then... whatever. I just want people to not pretend that this makes every kind of faith exactly equal.

You can never know for sure with the chair. Certainly in every day scenarios. The chair shows that there are varying degrees of faith. Faith based on absolutely nothing isn't faith at all. There has to be some basis. Misplaced faith might be overconfidence.

I guess the broader point there is that every belief has some external referent to work off of, and that no idea comes to be accepted without some form of outside stimuli to inform and reinforce it.

The trouble with people who make the chair analogy is that they're doing it in order to make it seem like every belief therefore has the same level of justification. Saying I have faith in chairs holding me up is fine, but that's not a defense of what Carm was talking about before, and yet I suspect he was expecting us to just look down and shuffle our feet before retreating, had we accepted his premises.