RE: Question about "faith"
September 21, 2020 at 7:10 pm
(This post was last modified: September 21, 2020 at 7:38 pm by Simon Moon.)
(September 21, 2020 at 1:14 pm)tackattack Wrote: Has the word salad been settled yet? Honestly, it's probably a good read, just far too many pages to catch up on. I have faith in God. I have faith that this chair will hold me up when I sit on it. They are the same faith. I believe in God and I believe in my chair. I do not have absolute faith that all people are good all the time. I do have faith that most people can be good.
I can't believe you are unable to see the problem with this!
You can take the chair to any culture, with any religious belief, or no religious beliefs. You can explain what it is for, you can teach cultures that don't have chairs, how to build them so that they are structurally sound. YOu can show them chairs made out of wood, metal, wicker, bamboo, etc, etc, and you would have no problems convincing them that they are all the same thing, with the same purpose. And most importantly of all, you can easily demonstrate to them that the chairs exist.
Please show how you can do the same thing with your god? Show them how trusting that the chair will hold them up, is even in the same ballpark as trusting that your god exists.
(September 21, 2020 at 3:26 pm)tackattack Wrote: Atheists have faith in their memories, faith in your reason, faith in your senses, etc. You don't rationalize and reason every thought or action, no one does. If you want to define faith as "blind trust, in the absence of evidence or despite evidence" then go right ahead. I believe that is not the common Christian understanding of the work faith.
I don't have faith in these things. They are what I am presented with. I am forced, pragmatically, to accept them.
They have shown to be reliable.
I have never been presented with a god in the same way that I have been presented with my memories, reason or senses.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.