Albert Cipriani

You are mushing up incredulity with faith. To compare faith to a lying thieving brat asking you to believe in his lies has got to be the most disingenuous quasi-definition of faith made thus far in this thread. [removed]-- Disgusted, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Godless Wonder

What has the religious person faith in? A real God? Or the priests and parents who preach and the book(s) from which they teach, also written by men? The faith of the religious is not any different from any other belief with out evidence. It's obvious I've hit a sore spot with this thread. The faithful don't like faith to be painted with the colors it deserves and resort to equivocation to try to make faith out to be something less distasteful than it really is.

Albert Cipriani

Once again, I present an arguable premise. It is ignored in favor of you guys repeating your limp party line. Does no one here no how to argue? What’s the point of talking past each other?

My point is that even the clinically paranoid have evidence for their insane beliefs. Yet you reserve the religious word “faith�? to describe impossible beliefs, beliefs that are beyond insane. Never mind that I (and you too if you ever tried to think about it) don’t know how to believe anything without evidence for it. It’s not so much that this tact of yours is insulting, but that it is definitionally solipsistic.

Right. The sore spot has resulted from you continuing to drive the same dull point up your… I mean, into the ground. – Disgusted, Albert Cipriani the Traditional Catholic

Ellis14

Sigh. Why don't you explain what you believe faith to mean then, in your religious sense, and then we can discuss it.

DBT

As Ellis10 said, please present your definition of faith.



OK what objective evidence does somebody who believes that they are Napoleon have to support their belief.
Evidence that anyone can look at and say yes this man has a good case.
Oh brother,this is getting silly.



There are no impossible beliefs,remember faith doesn't need supporting evidence.
All that is required is a strong desire for something to be the way you want it to be.
And then rationalisation works it's magic.

Albert Cipriani

Fair enough. It’s not complicated. There’s no “religious sense�? to it, just common sense.

As thought is insipient action (to quote Kant), belief is insipient faith. In other words, thought is to action what belief is to faith. In other words, an un-acted upon thought is an unconsummated action, and an un-acted upon belief is an unconsummated faith.

Thus, faithless “believers�? are as dead as disbelievers and are what Jesus had in mind when saying that on Judgment Day many will turn to Him and cry out “Lord, Lord!�? And He will say to them I know you not.

Scratch any fact, and you will find that it masks a theory of knowledge. Scratch any theory of knowledge, and you will find that it masks a belief. Act on that belief and you are exercising faith in that theory.

Ultimately, all that we know, is based upon all that we believe. The only question is what do we believe in enough to act upon? Those faithful actions reveal our metal or lack thereof. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

DBT

You seem to be implying that objective reality does not exist?

Albert Cipriani

Tho this seems like a simple question, it is actually quite complex. I find the distinction between real and unreal to be unreal. This is a linguistic assertion, not a metaphysical one.

Put it this way, many words and concepts are useful. For example zero, infinity, 3 o’clock, up/down, March 3rd. But that does not mean that such words and concepts reference what is real or true. For something to qualify as real or true, it must always and everywhere be as it is: like the speed of light, mass, spatial dimensions, the Trinity, logically valid inferences, and abstract relationships.

But, for example, 3 o’clock on earth might be high noon on Mars. Up at the north pole is down at the south pole, and zero in combination with other numbers references any number of real things but zero by itself references nothing but an imaginative construct that does not exist anywhere in our universe (e.g., an invisible pink unicorn).

Ditto for objective and subjective reality. I find these very useful terms and use them all the time. They help us sort out low level intellectual problems just like how 3 o’clock helps sort the relatively late from the relatively punctual. But press me to avow their existence and I will demur. To assert either their existence or non-existence is equally as wrong headed.

I prefer to think of everything as being real without qualification. Everything really exists and nothing is the only thing that really doesn’t-exist. Quantum physics is on my side here.

Nothing (more so than zero, 3 o’clock etc.) is as much a human invention as your claim that God is a human invention. This is the nexus point of our otherwise antagonistic points of view. Neither God nor nothing REALLY exists in this universe. But they both “absolutely�? exist relatively, that is, our relationship to both is subjective. We will be judged by God subjectively; we will experience the nothing of His absence in hell subjectively.

I apologize in advance for trying to answer your question more fully than I should have. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Ellis14

Albert, you seem to be saying that faith is the demonstration of beliefs; the action, or requirement of action, which demonstrates one's convictions.

If so, it would not make sense to say "I have faith in" anything. 'I have action in God', 'I have action in the Trinity', makes no sense. It might mean I act as though God existed, I act as though the Trinity were real to me. But if so, this makes the meaning of faith redundant. We all exercise our beliefs, everyday. By getting out of bed in the morning, I am acting on the belief that I'm in work today. By eating, I am exercising belief that I am hungry and need food. If you compare these beliefs to that of Christianity, I believe that is an unfair and insiduous way to obfuscate the meaning of faith.

Why did Jesus emphasise faith so much? Why is faith touted as essential for belief? If faith was merely the exercise of beliefs, Jesus' advice seems to be so obvious as to be completely useless.

Also, James said "just as the body without spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead." In other words, it doesn't matter what you have faith in, if you don't act on it, you may as well have no faith at all. Clearly, faith is not the exercise of beliefs, since faith is a precursor to our beliefs. And James himself said the two are obviously not the same. James is talking about belief. In Hebrews 11:1, Paul says the same thing; 'knowing what you believe'; 'holding as real that which is not, or doesn't appear to be'.

Faith might be a belief that we act on, and must demonstrate our conviction of, but there is no doubt that faith means belief and conviction. Without a doubt, a deep intense one.

Let's compare faith to other beliefs that we act on. On the one hand, we have the belief in gravity, in the sun rising, in a spherical earth, in the rules of logic and the laws of physics. On the other hand, we have an omnipotent uncreated Creator Being that sacrifices itself to itself to appease itself and save mankind from itself; the claim that a piece of bread that looks like bread, smells like bread, feels like bread, and tastes like bread, is not actually bread, but the body of Jesus Christ; in a God that created the sun, moon, and stars after the earth, and who made light before he even made the sun; in talking animals; in water being turned in wine; in a God that punishes sons for the father's actions but later denies that he does; in Creationism...

It is abundantly clear (no matter who is right or wrong) that there is a marked difference between action based on belief in general, and the kind of belief that religion calls 'faith'. The bible, and most religions, call upon faith as necessary to believe. But does this make sense? Must you believe, in order to believe? It hardly seems logical. If this is what faith means, then it makes no sense anyway, and is just another circular argument, and a way to wax poetically over trusting the absurd. But if we say that faith is the conviction in your beliefs; the dispelling of contrary reason or evidence, the context makes complete sense, and indeed the entire message of the bible, and religion becomes clear: "trust, no matter what, and you will believe!" I see no way for any theist to dispute this definition of faith, without removing the entire meaning from the word.

If faith is belief, no matter what, then it cannot be said to be rational. No belief, "no matter what", is rational. One cannot reject refuting evidence for a claim simply on the basis of conviction, and still be called rational. To exercise faith in a belief is to reject reason, proof, and evidence for a claim. But reason, proof, and evidence are our only criteria for evaluating a claim! Once one realises that faith is no less than this, the worrying problem becomes clear: it can be used to invest belief in anything. It is truly arbitrary.

I am not saying that theism is necessarily wrong, or that some theists don't have rational reasons for believing in God. It's not that atheists redefine faith so that theists look irrational by default. (Faith is not strictly a religious thing anyway). It's that faith is defined by religions in such a way that it is irrational.

If you believe God exists, fine. If you believe you have good evidence of this, fine. If you believe that the world only makes sense to you with God in it, and that your beliefs are justified, fine. But when the bricks of your religious wall are crumbling and the only thing holding them up is faith, you could use that cement to hold up any other wall in the world, on a whim. Perhaps that's why Jesus, Paul, James and others expound the "virtue" of faith, because its true, (and only power), is to hold firm the wall of belief. One cannot blame them, after all, as their religion would not exist without it.

Albert Cipriani

I have no problem with your characterization of my definition of faith as redundant and grammatically inelegant. The function of language is to express the truth. The function of the truth is not to find its way into elegant expressions. Virtually all of quantum physics suffers from the same lack of elegance. Yet experiment after experiment proves the truth of their inelegant verbal descriptions of what the hell is going on down there.

Jesus emphasized faith because it is the only antidote of hypocrisy. You might just as well have asked why Jesus condemned the hypocrisy of the Pharisees so much. These are two sides of the same coin. His harshest words were not against rape, murder, slavery, drunkenness, any of the truly evil things we suppose. His harshest harangues were against phoniness, for it is from phoniness that all those other seemingly unrelated evils derive.

Precisely my point.

You are hairsplitting and equivocating at the same time.

The equivocation involves using faith in two different senses. Faith is exercised by one’s action and processed by one’s potential to act. If one has acted on their beliefs even once (like in getting baptized) then they HAVE faith. Then, if they never act on their beliefs again, they fall under James indictment of being dead in their faith.

The hairsplitting involves the infinite regression of what comes first, faith or belief. They are as intertwined as our soul and body. Tho beliefs normally precede action, the reverse is possible. I have more than once acted on a belief I did not know I had until my action proved it to me. I once broke up with a girl this way.

The only thing that’s abundantly clear to me is that you have a Protestant understanding of faith.

I agree with you. Any religion that preaches that or interprets the Bible that way ought not to be joined.

You’ve just asserted the heresy of fideism. Beliefs that have been supercharged into blind conviction is a parody of faith. The Church defines faith as an act of intellection that involves the will to act. It has nothing to do with emotions or convictions, tho such consolations may accompany faith just as barnacles may accompany ships.

Yes. But only Protestants believe in faith no matter what. Only Protestants speak of blind faith or a leap of faith. Indeed, they must. For there is no rational justification for what few tenets of Protestantism that remain. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic