Christian trigger words

[The Grand Nudger]

As we are reasoning beings, Very little of what we actually chose to do is without reason. You may not like my reasons or have another standard, but I can have reason and faith. What I can't have is Faith and Evidence that is seen or complete understanding of, because, by that's how the Bible defines faith. I have evidence for lots of things in my life, I have reasons for almost everything, I have subjective observations and a partially complete understanding that rises above the level of plausible, indications for a God, IMO.

You should share them sometime....be a break from the usual drivel of "magic book said so!" and "because I don't know shit about xy and z!"

To simplify I'll just reword statements Having faith is an admission that the belief is not provable and Faith is a way of attaining knowledge when materialism alone can't get you there. This seems to be an atheist trigger word, so pardon if this is off topic.

Mostly down to how atrociously the faithful use the term..as you did, in point of fact, above.  As far as I can tell..it's been made to mean something like "the good" whereas materialism "the enemy" in believing circles. So I read the statement..I understand where it comes from..but there's no coherent deconstrunction -of- it. Faith never leads us to knowledge, it leads us to expectation. Far too often, it leads us into conflating our expectations with knowledge. I have faith that my wife will be with me forever..I have no such knowledge, and no amount of such a faith will lead to it, materialism isn't even a factor.

Just a quick note, that you may enjoy......"jesus" body was gone. He didn't lift up into the heavens on a ghost chariot leaving his husk...and the (super duper christy) christians still await the day that the dead literally and bodily rise from their graves (as they did in jerusalem that day, even though no one else noticed, lol). The notion that materialism is some "other end" of a coin...and that you need faith to get you where materialism wont take you...well..that's not actually the thrust of magic book. People believed because they saw it materially happen, so the story goes..and the story stands as a *testament to others that it's contents are materially true.

Paul even laments that if these things were not so..then the whole religion is folly. He doesn't seem to have had much time for faith, as you've conceptualized it...when you really dig into it.

The reason that they seem so now (faith/materialism) has more to do with the scholastics writing in some good pre-christian pagan philosophy through the medeival than how people envisioned their world at the big bc/ad changeover. It';s helpful to point out that until very recently..nobody even thought of "souls" as being immaterial in the manner that we use the term. Circles of salt (and a whole host of other fun things) interacted with ghosts..in their minds eye. Yet another one of christianity's self inflicted wounds - losing the vitalism that a fully contextualized spirit brings into the world by positing a second and distinct spirit world..instead. My father in law..to his immense credit, is trying to get himself back to that sort of turn of the clock footing. I don't believe in his silly religion..but it's interesting to watch him make a conscious effort to deprogram and change the way he thinks..so that he can get back to something we might call a genuine faith. It also helped alot with my marriage, specifically in that he raised his daughter in this way - which makes alot of the usual faith/non-faith stresses nonexistent for us.