A Believer's Thoughts on Faith

[Huggy Bear]

*emphasis mine*

So produce the evidence that disproves God, I'll wait...

You’ve got it exactly backwards. Atheism - the lack of belief in gods - requires no evidence. Atheism is not a positive belief, theism is.

GUBU essentially defined faith as holding a positive belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. I don’t need evidence to not believe in something. Theists manage to believe in something without evidence. If you can take from this that atheism qualifies as an article of faith, I suggest you re-read Hume.

Boru

*emphasis mine *

Exactly my point, if his definition of faith is "holding a positive belief in spite of evidence to the contrary." , what evidence is being disregarded that proves the contrary?

A theists belief isn't based on zero evidence, the majority of the time what causes someone to believe is an experience personal to them. Truth is a personal fact, it's not something that's necessarily universally known. For instance GUBU and Fireball don't believe I'm black... I personally know what the truth is, but apparently its not a known fact even though I've posted all kinds of pictures on this forum even doxxing myself, yet somehow they hold that belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. My question is... why are athiests so hypocritical?

[The Architect Of Fate]

Lol 

Not accepting your claims of god based on a total lack of evidence FOR it and not accepting your claim that you are black based on a total lack of evidence FOR it are both valid positions and personnel evidence is just an excuse for not having to prove your claims. Thus there is no hypocrisy as there is no inconsistency between action and belief.

[Jehanne]

You’ve got it exactly backwards. Atheism - the lack of belief in gods - requires no evidence. Atheism is not a positive belief, theism is.

GUBU essentially defined faith as holding a positive belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. I don’t need evidence to not believe in something. Theists manage to believe in something without evidence. If you can take from this that atheism qualifies as an article of faith, I suggest you re-read Hume.

Boru

*emphasis mine *

Exactly my point, if his definition of faith is "holding a positive belief in spite of evidence to the contrary." , what evidence is being disregarded that proves the contrary?

A theists belief isn't based on zero evidence, the majority of the time what causes someone to believe is an experience personal to them. Truth is a personal fact, it's not something that's necessarily universally known. For instance GUBU and Fireball don't believe I'm black... I personally know what the truth is, but apparently its not a known fact even though I've posted all kinds of pictures on this forum even doxxing myself, yet somehow they hold that belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. My question is... why are athiests so hypocritical?

Your claims about being black are falsifiable.

[arewethereyet]

You’ve got it exactly backwards. Atheism - the lack of belief in gods - requires no evidence. Atheism is not a positive belief, theism is.

GUBU essentially defined faith as holding a positive belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. I don’t need evidence to not believe in something. Theists manage to believe in something without evidence. If you can take from this that atheism qualifies as an article of faith, I suggest you re-read Hume.

Boru

*emphasis mine *

Exactly my point, if his definition of faith is "holding a positive belief in spite of evidence to the contrary." , what evidence is being disregarded that proves the contrary?

A theists belief isn't based on zero evidence, the majority of the time what causes someone to believe is an experience personal to them. Truth is a personal fact, it's not something that's necessarily universally known. For instance GUBU and Fireball don't believe I'm black... I personally know what the truth is, but apparently its not a known fact even though I've posted  all kinds  of pictures on this forum even doxxing myself, yet somehow they hold that belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. My question is... why are athiests so hypocritical?

You're black?

Who knew?

[Jehanne]

The first H. Sapiens were all dark-skinned.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm with the Huggster on this one. People often believe that they have at least some evidence for the articles of their faith - so it's probably not accurate to say that faith is a thing held in the absence of or in contradiction to evidence. We might accurately say that faith entails a certainty that the hypothetical evidence referenced doesn't actually meet...but hey, minor details. I have faith in my wife's fidelity, even though no fact of her not having stepped out before can actually guarantee that she won't step out tomorrow. Maybe the tomorrow guy is super awesome.

More esoterically, a "faith" can be devised by reference only to things that any given person deems to be (and actually are) objectively and demonstrably true. The only real question is not whether things are some particular way, but whether we agree that they should be that way. Even if we think (or are willing to concede) that there's good evidence that life was magicked onto earth - for example...so what?

[The Grand Nudger]

The first H. Sapiens were all dark-skinned.

Probably not -but I'm taking it further back than hss.  Probably light skinned. Ever seen a shaved chimp? If we're anything like other animals, we darkened after we lost our coats.

[Jehanne]

The first H. Sapiens were all dark-skinned.

Probably not -but I'm taking it further back than hss.  Probably light skinned. Ever seen a shaved chimp? If we're anything like other animals, we darkened after we lost our coats.

I'll leave this one to the experts.

[The Grand Nudger]

Most people associate Africans with dark skin. But different groups of people in Africa have almost every skin color on the planet, from deepest black in the Dinka of South Sudan to beige in the San of South Africa. Now, researchers have discovered a handful of new gene variants responsible for this palette of tones.
The study, published online this week in Science, traces the evolution of these genes and how they traveled around the world. While the dark skin of some Pacific Islanders can be traced to Africa, gene variants from Eurasia also seem to have made their way back to Africa. And surprisingly, some of the mutations responsible for lighter skin in Europeans turn out to have an ancient African origin.
“This is really a landmark study of skin color diversity,” says geneticist Greg Barsh of the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama. 
Researchers agree that our early australopithecine ancestors in Africa probably had light skin beneath hairy pelts. “If you shave a chimpanzee, its skin is light,” says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, the lead author of the new study. “If you have body hair, you don’t need dark skin to protect you from ultraviolet [UV] radiation.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/...skin-color

[Jehanne]

Difference between science & religion -- I stand/sit corrected!