RE: Question about "faith"
September 12, 2020 at 9:23 am
(This post was last modified: September 12, 2020 at 9:42 am by rockyrockford.)
(September 11, 2020 at 11:55 am)brewer Wrote:In regards to eternity. Most Christians ( I won't speak for other religions) believe that the body is made up in three parts, a body, a Soul and a Spirit. Without the presents of an eternal God keeping the soul alive, the body and the spirit die due to the presence of sin...Beginning with Adam. The spirit lives on after death in an eternity void of a living eternal God. What many refer to as Hell. But, the Christian belief system is that with a living God present in the soul, the belief is that the soul and spirt live on as one in the presents of an eternal God. I know (but with very limited knowledge) that many folks who believe in reincarnation don't consider themselves Christians, but believe that their soul and spirt come back to a new body.(September 11, 2020 at 11:02 am)rockyrockford Wrote: brewer, could you please tell me, is "atheism" considered a human religious belief system, even though a deity isn't worshipped? Or would an atheist consider themselves 100% void of any spiritual belief. That they simply exist one day, and they don't the next.
Thank you!!
Nope, not a human religious belief system. Atheists have little in common other than a lack of belief in god(s). Not much of a religion.
You'll need to define "spiritual belief". There is human spirit, team/group/community spirit, which is based in emotion but I don't think that's what you are referring to. I am void of any beliefs in god(s).
And yes, the same as all living creatures, individual existence begins and ends. If I procreate a part of my DNA may continue for a time. There is no after life except as memories of others.
You seen to reference concepts in extremes, ............... i.e. complete, eternal, 100%, ......... just an observation. My guess is that it's related to the god concept.
Interestingly, more atheists are able to tell me why they DON'T believe in God, than those who say they do believe in God. I attribute this to atheists spending more time weighing physical facts, while others rely on physical tradition.
Your openness about what you believe is greatly appriciated. I'm writing a paper on "faith" and the different ways folks perceive it. You've all been extremely helpful!!
(September 11, 2020 at 12:37 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote:I place my complete trust and confidence in The Lord Jesus Christ, and that He shed he innocent blood for me on the cross of calvary. I believe with all my heart that Jesus died, was buried, and three days later rose from the dead, and I believe what scripture says, that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. - I base all of this belief on "fellowship" with God. In prayer, in Bible reading, In songs, In thoughts...(September 10, 2020 at 7:54 pm)rockyrockford Wrote: If "faith" is defined as "complete trust or confidence in someone or something".(dictionary.com) As an atheist, do you have complete confidence or trust in anything?
The difference between an atheists faith and a theist's faith, in that context, is the difference between trust and confidence. We can all trust that some x was made to do y (or that some person x wants to do y)...but how many things (or people) do we have complete confidence in actually doing that y?
People and things made to do or who want to do some x can be trusted, and they can even be competent - and for reasons wholly unrelated to them, can fail. Complete confidence is bound up with omnipotence. Think of it like this. A professional driver in a purpose built car can avoid alot of collisions - but they can still be blindsided or rear ended or just generally wrecked. We could drop a bomb on them, see how their skills and gear work then. An omnipotent driver in an omnipotent vehicle could not, and the bomb would be ineffectual.
-and that's before we comment on misplaced trust and misplaced confidence, which all people engage in.
How about you? Laying aside misplaced feelings of trust and confidence, and assuming that you can very easily trust, do you have complete confidence in anything? What do you base that on?
But I imagine if you and I were sitting at a bus stop, and we struck up a conversation, we would quickly find common ground and enjoy each others company until the bus arrived... The topic of eternal "faith" or lack of, would never come up.
(September 11, 2020 at 12:54 pm)Angrboda Wrote: Faith is ultimately a question about how we know things as true, and what qualifications we give to that knowing based upon our path to knowing. Religious belief and other types of belief tend to use significantly different pathways towards confidence in what one knows, and as a result, the qualifications one ends up applying to the two are going to be different. I'm just spitballing my way toward other points here, but that may be one of the issues regarding interfaith discussions between atheists and theists is that, combined with relatively shallow concepts of things like faith, people with different riders attached to propositions which one regards as true may, being unvoiced, simply differ, with the result that people end up talking past one another. It gets even worse when such questions are raised in the context of an apologia or attempt to convert another toward one's chosen viewpoint."people end up talking past one another. It gets even worse when such questions are raised in the context of an apologia or attempt to convert another toward one's chosen viewpoint."
Ultimately though, faith is about knowing, and the philosophy of knowing is epistemology. Ignoring the tendency of people to have largely unintentional epistemologies, which they apply without any great consciousness that they are doing so, the long and short of it is that epistemology is still a very open question in philosophy with a great many unanswered questions, so there really is no conventional wisdom beyond Plato's justified true belief about how one navigates the subject. I find the subject fascinating, but my own personal views on the subject are hardly more intentional or consciously developed than anyone else's. So, as with many things, as I've aged, I've moved away from confidence I once held in certain propositions and toward embracing agnosticism across the board to a greater extent than I did when I was younger. That still leaves me with the epistemological questions, which, despite some misgivings of pragmatism as a formal philosophy, the pragmatist approach has assumed greater emphasis in my life.
I think that, in some respects, my earlier confidence in certain propositions may have been more an expression of hope, optimism, and vested interest (bias) than it was a product of sound thinking, so in hindsight I think I may have not uncommonly exceeded the warrant that the evidence gave me, trusting to my intuition without any rigor backing it up. I'm less inclined to do that these days, though I'm sure that like anybody else, I still do, the question is now more the extent to which I do that, and how doing so is likely to play out in my life. Yet another feather in the cap of the pragmatist approach there being that one can be more pluralistic and accommodating, even if it does come at the expense of certainty, and the moral mandate that certainty in a proposition seems to provide.
I don't have a settled epistemology, and while I understand why someone wants to compare faith in religion versus faith in secular contexts, it's very easy to, as with my former beliefs, let intuition and hope take one where the evidence and understanding have not yet visited.
In the past year, as well, I've come to the conclusion that, using ordinary common understandings about God in the Judeo-Christian religions, there can be no evidence for the existence of God. This is not a view which is likely to be embraced by religious people largely due to different understandings involved, so in practice I adopt a more colloquial view in which there can be and is evidence of God, and simply keep my own view under my hat. I find plenty to disagree with in discussions with other people without going there. The main one, which often splits atheists themselves is the question of whether or not there is evidence for God. If one adopts the negative position, that there isn't, one is going to come away with a radically different understanding of religious faith than if one doesn't.
(ETA: I see that I neglected to answer the question. As with Peebo there is little if any completeness in my understanding, so the best I can say is that I have faith of different kinds in varying degrees on many things, so the question about faith itself is not likely to be very illuminating without being more specific. A lot more specific.)
Well said. This is why I really wanted to have an open discussion about "belief" or lack thereof. I wanted to avoid debate because I believe more can be learned by listening than debating.
Thank you for your very honest and well thought out answer.