Question about "faith"

[Simon Moon]

Sorry if I missed that post, I did come in late as GN pointed out. If your friend attributes the betterment of his life to Hinduism, then that's great for him and his Hindu gods. I didn't dismiss it. If I was Hindu I would probably believe in those Gods as well. When I was wiccan I believed in the great mother. In my case, my limited understanding of God, within my worldview is very reliable, hence my belief. I agree that demonstrating the spiritual is hard, by substance, but not by content.

I am not saying you are dismissing my friend's experience or the improvement of his life, but you certainly dismiss the existence of his gods, and their hand in improving his life.

I completely understand that theists of all religions and god beliefs have experiences that they attribute to their gods. I am not doubting that. I just doubt that they are coming to the right conclusion for their experience.

All I am asking is, how do I (someone who is outside of ALL religious belief systems and god beliefs) discern if my friend's religious experience was due to the existence of an actual extant god, or yours is due to an actual extant god?

You both cannot be right, but you both can be wrong.

That there cannot be any demonstrable and falsifiable empirical evidence for the existence of your god, is not my fault. It is your god's fault.

He created me, with the facilities to figure out what constitutes good standards of evidence, yet, for his existence, he fails to provide said evidence to me. Again, not my fault for disbelieving he exists. Although, he seems OK with me using the same standards of evidence, for me to reject the existence of all those other gods.

[Belacqua]

I've repeatedly asked what faith does. No one has answered so far.

This is a very strange thing to say. John has described what faith is, for him, very clearly. In my last post I restated that in my own words. 

A wise man once said that the easiest person to fool is oneself, and it looks as though you are doing it.

At this point I think there are two arguments that could be made concerning the definition of faith that's been given.

1) In people's psychology faith doesn't really operate in the way described. 

2) Faith, as described, is warranted in some cases but not in the case of God.

[John 6IX Breezy]

This makes a lot of sense to me. I hadn't thought about it this way before. 

Something interesting about faith that further dissociates it from belief is that, for the Christian, faith is an action. It is a behavior. Something you demonstrate by doing. You walk by faith. Take leaps of faith. Faith is enacted.

You demonstrate faith in a chair by sitting on it. You demonstrate faith in a surgeon by going under the knife. You demonstrate faith in your girlfriend by not looking through her phone. If you're Moses you demonstrate faith by stepping on the Red Sea. If you're Noah you show faith by building the ark.

Faith in the Christian sense doesn't sit stagnant in the mind. The very nature of trust requires action from us: faith can be shown. This embodied nature of faith, I think, demonstrates there's a difference between it and merely believing things.

"Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works." (James 2:18).

[Fake Messiah]

@The Grand Nudger @Fake Messiah @Sal - I have no problems disbelieving in fairies and unicorn, not from their lack of physical-ness, but because I haven't experienced them. If I woke up tomorrow and (without psycho-reactive drugs) started seeing faeries floating around or unicorns galloping, I would have to seriously rethink my beliefs on faeries and unicorns. Faith IS mundane, and that's the point, we all use it day-to-day, unless you're defining it as "religious faith" or "blind faith", which some people here are.

Just as atheist say they believe in one less God than I do, I just have faith in one more thing than they do.

How does this make any sense? It's supposed to be a reply to my post that your faith is like the Muslim faith in Muhammad being the last prophet, and you are talking that you don't believe in faeries because you don't see them but you would believe in them if you saw them.

So are you saying that you see angels and Jesus and that's why you believe in Christian mythology?

[Sal]

I've repeatedly asked what faith does. No one has answered so far.

This is a very strange thing to say. John has described what faith is, for him, very clearly. In my last post I restated that in my own words. 

And you fail again. I didn't expect anything less. There's no action or doing that faith does, that can't be matched in greater measure by reason. Faith is the clown makeup of reason, in this regard.

A wise man once said that the easiest person to fool is oneself, and it looks as though you are doing it.

If you really believe that - which I expect you do not, surprise me - then you would realize that this applies to everyone, you included. Me, you, everyone. We have an internalized bias about our own convictions, which makes introspection difficult. The greater the hold of that conviction, harder it is to realize any possible faults in those convictions. Or even entertain possible faults. The way faith works, as apostates know so well intuitively, is a conviction so rooted in the psyche, that any question about its validity is for many a believer, even theistic scholars, a personal attack on their identity as humans. That's not a bug, but a feature of faith.

The reason Richard P. Feynman used that phrase in his Caltech commencement address in 1974, is because people have pet theories that they would disregard evidence that would disprove any inductive reasoning of a pet theory. Don't believe me?

Read it for yourself.

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

At this point I think there are two arguments that could be made concerning the definition of faith that's been given.

1) In people's psychology faith doesn't really operate in the way described. 

2) Faith, as described, is warranted in some cases but not in the case of God.

1) is closer to the truth about faith.

2) is a diversion.

A theist has faith in god. I don't doubt that. And the theist can write books about what that faith supposedly means for him. This is not the contention. The contention, as stated, does it work for stuff outside their heads, that can be explained as extant of their faith? Clearly theists are motivated by faith. That isn't the contention, it motivates them to charity, missionary work, helping people because their religious teachings tell them to and so on, but you can find this in any religion, as well as the inverse, indoctrination, torture, murder "because it is right", holy wars and genocide. Again, this isn't the contention.

Faith is best understood through the lense of psychology, from the onset, as asserting things with no prior knowledge or misattribution. The most common & ancient of which is the agenticity associated with faith. Like, when experiencing a rustle in some bushes, and immediately thinking someone is there, even to the point of being convinced someone is in there, rustling those bushes.

---

Have you ever heard about the notion of a parasitic concept, in language parasites (phorontology)? A very simple demonstration of such a parasitic concept, with a single word, is 'hole'. You can only device a model of a hole by its surrounding structure, "hole in a table", "hole in a wall", the word 'hole' together in sentences with tables and walls can only be described by a form of modulation of tables and walls - it's simple to see why too, when you remove tables and walls ... where does the 'hole' go?

Faith is a 'hole' in the same manner. You can't have faith without reason, any more you can't have minds without brains. As I, in an esoteric manner, yes, have described in detail and explored in different venues, faith is a parasite in your mind. It feeds of you and lives inside you in the same manner any other parasite would in the natural world from its host. Even much so, that the parasite in its efforts to propagate needs other minds to survive down the generations.

The reason Richard Dawkins uses the concepts of memes through the lense of cultural virus, with its own mechanisms for propagation and survival, is because they're so apt in explaining why they are transmitted in the first place.

Now, a mind parasite isn't necessarily harmful. For most people, with enough tolerance, a mind parasite like faith merely adds an unnecessary non-functioning mental abstraction in their minds that they think explains some aspects of reality, somewhat, which has the appearance of being a model but with no corollary in reality. The mind thinks this parasite explains something, despite any evidence to the contrary about some aspect of reality. The problem with any such parasite is that they're well secluded from detection, and even have mechanisms in their conceptual structure that combat detection attempts, they're cloaked.

I'm reminded of a quote in a TBS game called SMAC that used something Sun Tzu said about military strategy:

“If I determine the enemy’s disposition of forces while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it.”

— Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”

[GUBU]

Why do you believe in your chair?  You have sufficient evidence to prove it exists, and nobody has a reason to doubt its existence.  Belief is not needed.

I have faith in my chair and my God because I have sufficient experience that they both will support me.

I'm sorry but it is pointless having faith in your chair. You know it exists and you know that, unless it is broken, it will do the job it was designed to do. Faith does not, cannot, enter the equation, because we have knowledge.

Making a false equivalence between something we know exists and something with no evidence for its existence is a bad and stupid argument.

[Belacqua]

This is a very strange thing to say. John has described what faith is, for him, very clearly. In my last post I restated that in my own words. 

[...] There's no action or doing that faith does, that can't be matched in greater measure by reason.

OK, this is a different claim. First you said you hadn't been told what faith does. Now you say you have been told what faith does, but reason does it better. 

I'm not sure why you're contrasting faith and reason, since the religious people agree that reason is essential to faith. They say that faith is the exercise of reason in controlling emotion and impulse. 

Have you read John's posts at all? You could respond to what he says at some point.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't think that you're an outlier, John, I think that you're a craven liar. I don't know why the christians we get here say such ridiculous things. I chalk it up to the effect of bickering with atheists.

Tell you what, next time you're at church, peddle your faith™ there, see if your fellow cultists think that christian faith is a chair kind of thing? You won't, because it isn't, and you know better. You're taking a doomed position because you want to argue with atheists about the reasonableness of your superstitious beliefs.

It's either that or, again, you really do have a dead faith - that really is all that christian faith is, to you. I doubt that would make you much of a outlier either. Plenty of people just going through the motions, saying the magic words. It's been your call from the word go.

[Sal]

[...] There's no action or doing that faith does, that can't be matched in greater measure by reason.

OK, this is a different claim. First you said you hadn't been told what faith does. Now you say you have been told what faith does, but reason does it better. 

I'm not sure why you're contrasting faith and reason, since the religious people agree that reason is essential to faith. They say that faith is the exercise of reason in controlling emotion and impulse. 

Have you read John's posts at all? You could respond to what he says at some point.

You still don't get it. What does faith do, that reason doesn't?

It's all dancing around a central claim any apostate of any faith intuitively feels about the nature of faith itself.

Do the chachacha some more, fool.

[Mister Agenda]

Testimonial: When I was a Christian teenager, I struggled with lying and stealing. I would lie to protect myself or just to make myself seem more interesting, or to fit in. The shoplifting would kick in during the summer, when I lived with my even more religious father and step-mother. We went to church three times a week, and I went to Jesus camp to boot. When I joined the service and stopped attending services, these compulsions lessened. I read a book on moral philosophy that helped me understand how I was hurting others and even myself. At this point I was an agnostic theist, I still believed there was some sort of 'capital C' Creator, but after having read the Bible through front to back twice, I no longer believed anyone was speaking for it. I finally beat these tendencies altogether (I don't count lying to telemarketers) years later by the time I realized I no longer held any belief at all that some kind of deity really existed.

Does my testimony carry the same weight as that of a convert to Hinduism or Christianity? If not, isn't that a problem for such testimonials?