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Question about "faith"
#31
RE: Question about "faith"
(September 11, 2020 at 11:02 am)rockyrockford Wrote:
(September 11, 2020 at 10:37 am)brewer Wrote: Since faith is a human quality, attaching eternal to faith is a bit of a reach for atheists.

There may be eternal things, human faith is not one of them.

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.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem.
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#32
RE: Question about "faith"
(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?
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
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#33
RE: Question about "faith"
(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? 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.

 I don't take anything on faith, I need supportable evidence for everything I believe.

(September 11, 2020 at 11:02 am)rockyrockford Wrote:
(September 11, 2020 at 10:37 am)brewer Wrote: Since faith is a human quality, attaching eternal to faith is a bit of a reach for atheists.

There may be eternal things, human faith is not one of them.

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!!

Atheism is a reaction the a religion statement not a religious statement itself. 
I would expect if someone asked you if you believed that Gansehe the elephant headed god was real you'd say no because its ridiculous.
Atheism is the same thing but substitute Yahweh for ganeshe.



You can fix ignorance, you can't fix stupid.

Tinkety Tonk and down with the Nazis.




 








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#34
RE: Question about "faith"
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.

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.)
[Image: extraordinarywoo-sig.jpg]
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#35
RE: Question about "faith"
The ops question regarded faith, and it would be more than a little bit strange to ask if atheists knew anything - while it's completely understandable to ask if they have faith in anything.

Faith isn't about knowing, not ultimately, not at all. Faith is commonly about feeling like we know, though - and that's as close as the two get.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
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#36
RE: Question about "faith"
(September 11, 2020 at 12:59 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Faith isn't about knowing, not ultimately, not at all.  Faith is commonly about feeling like we know, though - and that's as close as the two get.

How do we know what we know apart from feeling like we know?
[Image: extraordinarywoo-sig.jpg]
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#37
RE: Question about "faith"
I think that you and I can do better than some boilerplate emotivist/cognitivist bit

You answered your own question in asking it, anyway. -If- we have no other way of "knowing", than feeling like we know, then we don't know anything. There are no true cognitive statements. "I am alive" is not knowledge, it's not true - it's just a feeling.

Again, knowledge and faith are not equivalent, and no amount of unfortunate mistakes or happy accidents of knowledge and faith could make it otherwise. Even in the case of our having nothing other than feelings - that would be us being incapable of knowledge, not the two being equivalent. There's more than a little bit of irony in a disagreement (or in questions over a disagreement) from a non-cognitivist pov, don't you think? Are you expecting a position informed by facts from a creature incapable of knowledge? Something logical that proceeds from true (or at least sound) cognitive propositions?

Engaging in the discussion, all by itself, reduces the objection to a stolen concept. Requiring the truth of what we're arguing against. We'd have to require the proposition "we know what we know on account of feeling like we know" to be cognitively true. This sort of objection well and truly reduces to a comment on how, on account of some people being bad at math, there is no fact of two and two. It's true enough of people, but not true of facts, or of two and two.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
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#38
RE: Question about "faith"
(September 11, 2020 at 11:02 am)rockyrockford Wrote:
(September 11, 2020 at 10:37 am)brewer Wrote: Since faith is a human quality, attaching eternal to faith is a bit of a reach for atheists.

There may be eternal things, human faith is not one of them.

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!!

I can't speak for any other atheists, but as far as I can see there is no reason to believe in spiritual things, so when I die , that's it, the machine stops, everything for me will be over. I think that religion is simply a crutch for people who are unable or unwilling to face this. I intend to enjoy my life while I have it and hope in my small way to make things better.
(I have no fear of death, I won't exist just as I didn't exist 500 years ago, the actual process of dying is another matter .... possible nasty, painful and best avoided!)
The meek shall inherit the Earth, the rest of us will fly to the stars.

Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups

Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in mud ..... after a while you realise that the pig likes it!

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#39
RE: Question about "faith"
A certain subset of religion, anyway. Religions don't have to have anything to do with spirits, or gods, or afterlives. I've always wondered the order in peoples heads. Do they believe in their religion because they think their god is true, or do they believe in their god because they think that their religion is true?
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
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#40
RE: Question about "faith"
I used to say I wasn't religious enough to call myself an atheist. Now I don't bother with that much of a statement most of the time. Religion is utterly unnecessary.
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