Question about "faith"

[Foxaèr]

I meant what I meant.

[GrandizerII]

As for the OP:

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? or anyone? If so, what is the foundation for that "complete" faith.

I'm not looking for an argument, so you don't have to be guarded. I'm simply wanting to learn more about your belief, or absence of belief.

No, I don't have complete trust or confidence in anyone/anything. I trust certain people to a large degree but no one is going to be completely reliable and/or flawless. We're all human beings, and we're gonna fuck up here and there. If we care about someone, we don't need to completely trust in them (that's a fairy tale advice we like to give to ourselves) but we can learn to live with their flaws and accept them and love them in spite of them. It helps when the other person has the same sort of attitude of course.

Does this answer satisfy your curiosity? Or were you meaning to ask about a specific kind of faith?

[John 6IX Breezy]

Faith is not knowledge that god exists

There's no disagreement here. Faith is trust in God; not knowledge that God exists. That's basic Christianity.

[The Grand Nudger]

To the contrary, I think it is primarily cognitive. Faith/Trust requires the processing and appraisal of information to execute. I think anyone that says faith is primarily a feeling is reaching really deep into their pockets to make stuff up.

Throwing an awful lot of christians under the bus on that one.  Christians who do express that their faith is a feeling, perhaps even the strongest feeling that they have.  

There's nothing wrong with having very strong feelings, John. Very strong feelings can inform us the same way that knowledge can inform us.

Let me ask you a couple q's. If I trusted that god was going to throw me in the pit - is that faith in god? If I believed in the christian god, but wasn't a christian - is that faith? If I knew there was a god, and rejected it...is that faith?

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While you chew that over, I'll offer something that is like faith, at least in my estimation. Patriotism.

I don't think that america is the greatest country in the world on account of any particular fact that could be true or false. I haven't reasoned my way to it. I don't trust america, as I trust my wife - but I'd like to and would if I had the opportunity. I often have very little confidence in it - but I would like to have much more and would if I had the opportunity. Nevertheless, I feel very strongly about america. My faith, if you will, in america... is like any religious persons faith in their own convictions in a way that I think is instrumental to what faith is and means. It's not a true thing - it's a thing that I'm so committed to that I would make it true. A thing I feel so strongly about that I would search for and explain a way for it to be true, whatever the given circumstance or fact on the ground, and even as those facts change.

[Sal]

What information are you appraising when you assess whether or not something exists ?

Sensory input.

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Unlike faith, patriotism at least is correlated to a notion of pride/love/devotion to one's country. I'm pretty sure countries exist.

Although I like living in the country I was born in, I don't have any particular strong emotion attached to it, like patriotism would, despite my upbringing in its culture. Reason being I would probably feel different and be different if I was born in any other country. Maybe I would hate being born in Iran, or be patriotic if I was born in Peru. I would be very different in any difference in graphical location of birth. That seems to me to invalidate giving praise for starting conditions and geographical location, no matter who I was. I guess my point is, why would someone be patriotic? This seems to me to be tangentially related to faith.

[GUBU]

Your definition is wrong.  Faith is simply the unjustified belief in a god for which you have no evidence.  As an atheist, I cannot have faith.

That's the atheist strawman definition lol. Within Christianity faith is synonyms with trust.

Believing a lie doesn't make it true. Your faith remains an unjustified belief in something without evidence.

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You can trust in God with all your might, but that doesn't confirm his existence or make him real.

Exactly; that's why it's a strawman when atheists act like it does. That's not how we use faith in Christianity.

You're wrong there. The only strawmanning being done here is by you. You are mangling the arguments of others to make them into easily defeated straw men and then claiming we are strawmanning you. Everything you post here bears out my initial observation on faith.


In fact it goes further, your previous post which takled about Jesus walking on water shows that not alone have you an unjustified belief but that you are unwilling to examine and test your belief. Most of the 'miracles' in the bible are easily debunked myths used to big up first the Jews beyond thier real existence as a small and insignificant tribe at the desert edge of the fertile crescent civilisations and latterly to big up the nythixal Jesus so that he could stand up to the myriad of "miracle workers" running around the hellenic world of the Early Roman Empire.

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And just what does,  "Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods" mean, anyway?

It means trust. For example, if your wife says she loves you, faith is trusting that she loves you even on days when your mood would have you believe otherwise.

You trust your significant other (I use this because love isn't binary) because over a period of time they have demonstrated that they can be trusted. You cannot say the same thing about god.

[The Grand Nudger]

Like your apriori assumptions that all faith is unreasonable? It’s clear you feel reason and faith are clearly two separate things. Why are they mutually exclusive? Why does your definition of faith not have a check and balance system?  Why couldn’t reason be the very mechanism by which faith can correct itself, thus having a reasonable faith? The answer is found in your biases that religious faith has to be irrational to support your claims.

As usual, the tq fails for the same reason that a tq always fails.  They rely on accepting that a person is doing the same thing.  A person confusing their strong feelings about faith as something else, would just be one more person confusing their strong feelings about a thing as something other than strong feelings about a thing.

At any rate, if faith is a very strong feeling, ofc it's not rational. The way we feel about things isn't rational and it doesn't have to be. Go ahead, try and tell me that chocolate is better than vanilla.

Would using a-rational help? Irrational has all those negative connotations, a-rational is probably a better description. We don't have to be dumb nutters who can't logic good to feel things, and being smart cookies who can logic doesn't mean that we can't feel a certain way, the same way a nutter does, about the same thing. Jesus, vanilla, britney, america...take your pick.

As for why a person can't have a check and balance system and have faith...I don't know, ask the person who wrote the ye of little faith bit. Their check and balance system got them into a particular kind of shit. It's almost as if the authors of magic book were on to something that contemporary christians just can't accept. I think that shows the creeping effect of secularism inside your jesus loving skulls. You value the sorts of knowledge claims and epistemology we value, even when they stand in competition or contradiction to the value making properties espoused by your religion...and even though it's always very clear that whatever you have going is different than what we have going. Hell, clear that it's different than what you have going over just about any other area of your lives.

It's not reason, or trust, or confidence in any sense related to those terms use in any other context, though I'm sure that you rationalize every square inch of the place, as human beings do with anything we feel. Faith is, and is meant to be, an experience unbound to the facts of the matter of the contents or our ability to appraise them. If it were a cognitive proposition, and could be true or false, and were false - you wouldn't abandon it - you would make it true.

[Gwaithmir]

You can trust in God with all your might, but that doesn't confirm his existence or make him real.

Exactly; that's why it's a strawman when atheists act like it does. That's not how we use faith in Christianity.

Then you are the only Christian I know out of hundreds who regards faith this way. Not a straw man at all.

[Rahn127]

What information are you appraising when you assess whether or not something exists ?

You mean what information are you appraising when you have faith/trust in someone?

No I wrote the question correctly.
What information are you appraising when you assess whether or not something exists ?

Are you able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy ?
How do you test to see if something is real or imaginary ?

[John 6IX Breezy]

Throwing an awful lot of christians under the bus on that one.  Christians who do express that their faith is a feeling, perhaps even the strongest feeling that they have.  

Faith/trust are not feelings. They are not described as feelings in Scripture. And to the contrary, my quote which said faith functions in spite of your feelings and changing moods, comes from C.S. Lewis. Perhaps the most widely read and most basic of all Christian writers.

Just one random Google search for faith and feelings and you run into quotes like this: "Faith is a choice; not a feeling. It means trusting God even when life doesn't seem to make sense" -Dave Willis.

I recommend attending church rather than watching YouTube videos about church. Some people here haven't been to church since they were 14 and it shows lol.

Feel free to quote one of those Christians I'm throwing under the bus who say faith is a feeling.