a cheap sort of top dressing

[crazilla]

For a few years now i've refined my distaste for religion from a childhood disinterest in the fairy tales of recent millennia (unfair in contrast to my growing appreciation for those of antiquity) to a a refined and scrutinized intolerance for the stunting and controlling role faith (meaning baseless belief) currently plays in human affairs on all

Comments

[annanaka]

Meh. Having faith in people is a tricky little thing. No matter what you choose to call it, without it the world is sort of hopeless. I might agree with you that it's just some form of optimism, the hope or wish or thought or belief or whatever that all will be well, that people are good, that good things are supposed to happen to us, etc. Love deals heavily with all of this, making it all the more muddled and rationally inexplicable, as people in love are totally irrational and can't explain anything. =P

[crazilla]

You make a good point! I might be expected to argue that love comprises very rational behavior, in that people who have fallen in love have in some way verified their trust and good natures to each other. But this is certainly not how it works.

In these terms, i understand love more as a decision than a feeling (though the feelings are crucial) or belief; you love someone when you've acknowledged their faults, even possibly disastrous ones, and resolved to pursue the relationship despite these factors working against it. By making that decision, you champion responsibility over faith; you accept the necessary likelihood of failure and act in accordance, rather than denying it and acting as though no problems exist.

To "rationalize away" the bad parts sounds to me like denying them or ignoring them. If your meaning is closer to looking past them or "filing" them, then i think we're not far removed. ^_^

[annanaka]

I think there's a lot of gray area between truly acknowledging and accepting faults and "filing" them and just denying their existence. I also think that most people float around somewhere in this gray area rather than being on one extreme or the other.

[crazilla]

This is also true. I suppose what i mean is more which end one strives for, rather than where in the gray area one's actions lie (provided one isn't just utterly unsuccessful and the two are far removed).

Of course, this may just be me still trying to imbue the conversation with optimism. . . .

[patmweav]

Faith has always confused me. I believe in experience based faith, as in faith based on what your intuition and experience with people tells you, but not cultural based faith, like religion. I wouldn't consider myself an atheist because I cannot absolutely say there is no god or gods or anything like that, but can't see it as truth because of a lack of empirical evidence, and I mostly feel like being so specific about the meaning and creation of the universe and the nature of it's creator indicates that these stories are just wild speculation by a few good story tellers. I also agree that it's a little annoying that people believe that in order to be a good person, you need religion to tell you what's right and wrong. I'm not sure if there's a universal right and wrong, but I tend to do what feels right and good, and I believe I am mostly a good person. I also can't stand the all too common religious view of "if you don't believe what we believe, you'll be condemned in the afterlife". Now I don't know if there's an afterlife or not,

[crazilla]

Indeed. The three big reasons i usually see for religious faith are upbringing (apparently what you call "cultural based faith"), morality ("you need religion to tell you what's right and wrong") and salvation ("if you don't believe what we believe, you'll be condemned in the afterlife"). Of course, none holds any real sway, and the argumentum ad populum fallacy i brought up before holds more sway than any of these.

I think i can clarify a bit w.r.t. our terms, though: By "faith" i mean the baseless faith inspired by religion; to me, "blind faith" is a somewhat redundant phrase. What you call "experience based faith" i would perhaps call "trust", which is earned rather than taught, or "intuition", a questionable but testable (hence meaningful) type of enhanced awareness.

Finally, "atheism" and "agnosticism" are broader than their popular conceptions; in particular, atheists need not deny the existence of supernature, agnostics can subscribe to religions, and the two terms are not mutually exclusive.

...we must cultivate our garden

[anonymous]

This is a topic that I've been thinking on for some time and I agree with much of what you've said. And while I am not completely convinced that faith itself is "vile and corrupting", on a broader level I think there exists a corrupting notion that faith absolves the faithful. In that sense I fear that faith and optimism are hopelessly intertwined - The siren song of a natural resolution to our problems echos hollowly through both ideas, calling people towards inaction. The philosophy of Leibniz has it's own problems, as Voltaire so eloquently put it in his famous satire. Optimism and faith are too often used in modern religion as a convenient cure all; If only we were to express our faith through monetary donations or by buying crosses, statues or icons, we will be cured of sickness and poverty. As long as we have faith we don't have to think, don't have to act, don't have to worry. God or the natural order of things will take care of us

Re: ...we must cultivate our garden

[crazilla]

Hmm. I must acknowledge the positive role of faith that many people are able to ascribe, but i'm hesitant to let any of that positive assessment go to the idea of faith itself rather than to the person. As it seems to me, people can assign themselves quite a variety of "chargers", i suppose, or stimuli or fuel to help them through the difficulty of pursuing their own hopes and dreams. I must admit, believing that any good can come of one's own actions in the face of an (apparently) largely disinterested world takes a lot of conviction, and if you can't find it in your own experience or rationalize it somehow, i suppose you're forced to take it on faith