RE: Question about "faith"
September 17, 2020 at 9:54 am
(This post was last modified: September 17, 2020 at 10:00 am by Mister Agenda.)
(September 16, 2020 at 9:40 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(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.
Alas, the dictionary makes a distinction that you are NOT making:
faith
/fāTH/
noun
noun: faith
1.
complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
"this restores one's faith in politicians"
h
Similar:
h
Opposite:
mistrust
2.
strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.
(September 16, 2020 at 10:14 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: The issue I think you're having is attempting to view a religious topic from an atheist perspective. No Christian ever says "I have faith that Jesus walked on water" unless they are talking to an atheist. Christians by definition already believe God exists and that Jesus walked on water. Rather, faith within a Christian perspective only takes place after you are sure of God's existence. It doesn't make sense before that, and faith is not the means by which to arrive at that. Faith is not for believing God exists, but for trusting God after you believe he exists.
That seems to be an idiosyncratic definition, I've never heard a Christian define it like that before, and I was a devout one. The second sense of the word 'faith' is clearly in play here.
(September 16, 2020 at 11:55 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: Christians don't conflate faith with knowledge. That is largely an atheist thing, as can be observed in this thread alone. When you attend church, and hear the conversations Christians have amongst each other, faith is used to signify trust.
Quotes such as "Faith is belief without evidence and reason" come from atheists.
Whereas quotes such as "Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods" come from Christians.
I still attend church, or at least I did before the plague, and I'm pretty sure you're over-generalizing from your own church. What is it, 40% of Americans are Christian fundamentalists? What you're saying certainly doesn't reflect their views. You'd think awareness of thousands of Christian sects would make you a little more hesitant about making general claims about what Christians believe; the core beliefs all Christians hold are pretty small in number.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.