What do you mean by "faith"? Do you blur the different meanings?

[Silent3]

Do you think faith is a virtue, and if so, what kind of faith is virtuous and what's so virtuous about it?


Here are some of the different kinds of faith I can think of. These definitions aren't necessarily mutually exclusive -- there is some overlap:

• One kind of faith, typically an unspoken faith, is simply a matter of taking something for granted to a degree that you don't spend much, if any, time worrying about it, like having faith that the ground isn't too likely to open up and swallow you as you walk or drive down a street. These sorts of things actually do happen now and then, but unless you're involved in road construction or a geological survey for hidden sinkholes, there's little to be gained and a lot to be lost in constantly worrying about such problems. This kind of faith isn't particularly virtuous, however, it's just practical.
  
  
• Then there is faith in a friend, family member, or other loved on. For most of us it's not that we think it's entirely impossible that these people might disappoint us or even turn on us some day, but we choose to act as if we can trust these people, making little or no provision for the chance of our faith being misplaced. This kind of faith can be virtuous, because it can be a generous act that will be appreciated by another person when they see the faith you extend to them. This kind of faith, however, can also be stupidly misplaced in the wrong people, in which case it's not a virtue, but a terrible mistake.
  
  
• There's faith like the above, but placed in invisible beings and imagined spiritual forces. Since there's no reason to believe anything as powerful as a God, however, should need the kind of feeling fellow human beings can get from us when we extend them our faith, I don't see where there's any virtue here, only the risk of being wrong and the possible (but to me distasteful) benefit of finding happiness in a fictional illusion.
  
  
• There the kind of faith which is absolute, unswerving certainty despite a lack of the kind evidence that would rationally lead to such certainty. I don't consider this virtuous at all. I'm afraid, in fact, I'd have to call this kind of faith ignorant, stupid, or both. I see no good reason to suppose we're living in a universe that, for some unknown reason, places such great value in this kind of faith that mystical forces and magical beings are sitting back waiting to see if a person exhibits this kind of faith before granting good fortune or "salvation".
  
  
• There's an even more intense version of the above variety of faith that stands not only in the face of a lack of evidence, but that stands in the face of contrary evidence. There's no way I give anyone any "credit" for the "power of conviction" here -- this is outright willful stupidity, not anything I care at all to place on a pedestal as some kind of virtue.

[blueworld]

1. Be it done unto you according to YOUR faith

I surely don't want to be snarky, but there are those of us who aren't fanatics yet we KNOW - our faith is based on our direct experience with things you may not believe in. Do you have faith in our intelligence to determine our reality?

No. If a person doesn't themselves "have faith" in something or someone, they make excuses to discard the faith of others as coincidence, ignorance, hallucination or mental illness or outright fakery or whatever. The same tool used by fire-breathing fanatics to dismiss science or the experiences of those in OTHER faiths.

Again, I don't want to offend at all, but if God isn't real, no harm no foul. If God is real, it's more important that God believes in us.

For myself, I can find God about anywhere except a church or temple or synagogue. Go figure:)

[Silent3]

2. "Your" reality? As in the personal separate reality you exist in?

Once you start speaking of "reality" as if it were personal, you cheapen and devalue the meaning and usefulness of the word, as if it meant nothing more than "perspective".

While it can be dismissed as just an assumption (since I can't prove, for example, that you're even real, and not just a figment of my imagination -- and vice versa) that there is a shared reality of objective facts which are true for all people, it is a very powerful and useful assumption. Shared reality is implicit in the concept of communication. If we can assume no common ground, we cannot assume any possibility of meaningful communication.

Do I have faith in your intelligence to determine "your" reality? Frankly no, I do not.

That doesn't mean I'm calling you stupid, however. Intelligent people still make lots of mistakes. I merely don't think you're applying your intelligence very well on this particular issue if you don't consider the very, very common human failings of confirmation bias, emotional bias, delusion, etc., when you evaluate your supposed "direct experience" of things. You don't have to be crazy or stupid to believe things that aren't true -- people the world over do it all the time. There are psychological tests that show how very easy it is to make ordinary people firmly believe things that just aren't so.

The problem with granting everyone faith in determining their reality is that there's too much contradiction to be found that way. People who earnestly proclaim FAITH in all manner of things come up with not only a wide variety of supposed realities, but often mutually incompatible realities. The old "blind men and the elephant" story is not sufficient to explain away the many contradictions of various faiths. Somebody proclaiming faith has to be wrong, and if somebody has to be wrong, why not most or all being wrong, when none of them can present good evidence for their claims?

If you (a hypothetical, for-example "you") claim "faith" leads you to believe in spiritual advancement and punishment via reincarnation, and another person claims salvation is found solely through Jesus, can I really give both of you the benefit of the doubt that you're both correct? When the two of you die, what happens to you? Do you both get what you want in the next life, but find the other person has escaped the fate you thought would be theirs? Is there a copy of you that comes back as a cow (for some, this is supposedly a great thing) and another copy burning in a lake of fire in that other guy's reality? Does the other guy get into heaven while simultaneously living a parallel life in your reality as a parrot or a dung beetle?

[trotsky]

3. I don't know if there is a more misused word in this forum.

Equivocating on the word "faith" is pretty much the foundation of every argument about "fundie atheists" or whatnot.

[laconicsax]

4. I find your lack of faith disturbing.

[Silent3]

5. Religious faith would certainly seem a bit more impressive...

...if it yielded results like levitating objects and choking people from across the room.

[laconicsax]

7. You can't prove it doesn't!

I'm sure that if you pray hard enough, some god will grant you the ability to shoot lighting from your fingertips. If it doesn't happen, maybe you weren't praying earnestly enough or it wasn't in that god's plan to give you the ability. Rinse and repeat.

[trotsky]

8. That'd be fricking awesome. I'd be a true believer if that were the case. n/t

[saltpoint]

11. And it would be super cool to be able to strangle someone on cable news

while we're watching it in the family room.

Please tell me that would be within plausible reach.

I'm preparing my list of talking heads as we speak.

- - -

I like this thread, Silent3.

[saltpoint]

6. In most cases, competing definitions of 'faith' are self-blurring and none

of us has to lift a finger to blur them.

Of the many versions, the first one that popped into my head after reading this thought OP was Lou Reed singing "It takes a busload of faith to get by."

And there's a lot of different kinds of folks riding' that bus.

[Silent3]

9. Isn't that kind of faith just a coping mechanism, not a virtue?

And does the efficacy of faith as a coping mechanism actually lend any credibility to the specific things one might have faith in? If believing that there's an elephant living in my attic helps me sleep at night, and I do indeed sleep well, does that prove there is an elephant in my attic?

[saltpoint]

10. Each person doing the defining would have his or her own blueprint,

seems to me.

Very hard to find simple categories.

"The faithfulness I can imagine," write poet Adrienne Rich, "would be a weed flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief."

That is a determinedly pre-Christian, almost pre-consciousness formulation of faith, a plunge into very ancient Jungian archetypes shifting around in the subconscious and discoverable in fragments of a dream-state.

And I by god like it.