(September 16, 2020 at 1:09 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Actually, Nomad gave a good definition of faith.
To understand it better look at it this way: Faith is pretending to know things you don’t know.
For instance, if a religious person says “I have faith in God.”
What he is actually saying is: “I pretend to know things I don’t know about God.”
Or when a theist says: “Life has no meaning without faith.”
He is saying: “Life has no meaning if I stop pretending to know things I don’t know.”
Or when a religious person says: “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.”
He is saying: “I don’t pretend to know things I don’t know enough to be an atheist.”
The Online Etymology Dictionary defines faith as: "faithfulness to a trust or promise; loyalty to a person; honesty, truthfulness"
When a religious person says, I have faith in God, they are saying they trust God in some way; they trust God will save them, they trust God will forgive them, they trust God will help them. They are not pretending to know or not know anything.
Faith is assenting to any proposition, based upon the credit of the proposer. How reasonable faith is depends on how trustworthy the proposer is.