Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Faith is a way to quit using, “God given” power of Reason and Logic, and cause the faithful to embrace doctrines that moral people reject.

The God of the O.T. says, “Come now, and let us reason together,” [Isaiah 1:18]

How can literalists reason with God when they must ignore reason and logic and discard them when turning into literalist?

Those who are literalists can only reply somewhat in the fashion that Martin Luther did.
“Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.”
“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has.”

This attitude effectively kills all worthy communication that non-theists can have with theist. Faith closes the mind as it is pure idol worship.

Literalism is an evil practice that hides the true messages of myths.

We cannot show our faith based friends that they are wrong through their faith colored glasses.

Regards
DL

youtube.com/watch?v=3O1_3zBUKM8

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DL, tools are not just objects.

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Not all faith is anti-reason. I have faith that I will be alive tomorrow. I don’t know that for a fact. It is reasonable to believe I will be alive tomorrow.

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I agree.

Words can be as well.

Regards
DL

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You have history driving that. Faith with facts is good. Faith without facts is for fools.

In religious faith, there is nothing as tangible.

Regards
DL

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Fools have faith in life.

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That picture makes me happy. :smiley:

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Actually atheists have proved yourselves much more close minded and ignorant in my “Anti Atheist” thread. How is this possible? It’s easy. I’ve demonstrated that atheists perform bad faith arguments, dishonesty, and outright lying. Atheism is a childish ideology that rejects moral responsibility and taking accountability for thyself and your actions throughout life.

For example, in my Anti Atheist thread, I challenged atheists to define god. Explain to me in detail, what/whom exactly you deny exists! And what do atheists do? They do nothing. They sit their in silence, waiting for theists to define god first. Which I also have done, many times. Atheists are too cowardly to put a definition to god, because, then this would expose their own ignorance and close mindedness. It would expose your bias and bigotry. It would expose atheist lies.

Atheists depend on theistic definitions and interpretations of god, to exist, and to define yourselves as atheists.

Atheism is merely a childish reaction, an unfounded denial of god, without even knowing what/whom god is.

For example, the atheist is somebody who claims “Gadolinium” doesn’t exist!!! But, silly atheist, you don’t even know what Gadolinium is!!!

The atheist merely rejects whatever the theist says, without even listening to the definition of Gadolinium.

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Greatest I am: Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Faith is a way to quit using, “God given” power of Reason and Logic, and cause the faithful to embrace doctrines that moral people reject.

The God of the O.T. says, “Come now, and let us reason together,” [Isaiah 1:18]

How can literalists reason with God when they must ignore reason and logic and discard them when turning into literalist?

Those who are literalists can only reply somewhat in the fashion that Martin Luther did.
“Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.”
“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has.”

This attitude effectively kills all worthy communication that non-theists can have with theist. Faith closes the mind as it is pure idol worship.

Literalism is an evil practice that hides the true messages of myths.

We cannot show our faith based friends that they are wrong through their faith colored glasses.

K: you are correct in this. Faith does close the mind to other possibilities.
When I declared that there is not god and asked for evidence, those believers
said I will have the evidence when I have faith. In other words, faith proceeds
evidence. You must have faith to see the evidence, not the other way, which is
see the evidence and than have faith. but faith can be misguided.
As Hume showed us, having faith that tomorrow will come is wishful thinking.
We have no idea if tomorrow will come, individually or collectively.
To say, the sun will rise tomorrow is faith, habit of days gone by,
not proof that the sun will rise tomorrow. We don’t know if the sun will rise
tomorrow. I for one, hopes it will, but I can’t prove it or know it. I can only
hope it will rise tomorrow. Faith in matters of cause and effect is simply a matter
of habit, as Hume showed us. When I go to bed tonight, I have no evidence I will awaken
tomorrow morning. I might die of an heart attack or be stabbed by the wife or child tonight.
I can never know. I simply sleep and hope I awaken. I see little in the universe that I can
have faith in. I am a modern man in this regard, but I don’t flee like so many others
into such false matters like god. I cannot have faith in things that are so transitory,
like the universe, earth, god, even matter is transitory. How can we have faith when
even matter is transitory? Everything including me is temporary, transitory. Where lies
faith in such a transitory existence?

Kropotkin

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I am not an atheist, I am a Gnostic Christian, but how could anyone, even a theist, describe what all traditions and faiths say is an unfathomable and unknowable God?

How can you evaluate whatever an atheist would say when you cannot even describe God according to your own traditions?

I do recognize that religions describe various attributes to God but they too are going against their own written holy book that all say that God’s attributes cannot be known or described.

If the atheists were to take all the attributes given to God, all they could tell you is that he is said to be Omni-everything.

So what kind of description would you accept? Just the description of your own God. Right?

You also have to remember that atheists are not into woo while most religions and God concepts cannot exist without woo, miracles and magic. All supernatural garbage to an atheist.

Regards
DL

11

I usually use faith for religious issues but not for daily issues. For those I use the word hope as you did above.

I certainly hope I awaken tomorrow but I would not say I have faith that I will awaken tomorrow.

In religion, I say that faith without facts is for fools.

Faith in other areas I can live with. If you said you had faith in the sun coming up tomorrow, I would not doubt or question it as you are going by past, repetitive knowledge for evidence. That is a whole different situation.

Regards
DL

12

Faith is good if it potentiates truth, and bad if it closes us off from truth.

There is a kind of faith that runs deeper than faith, and which unites consciousness unto itself. Reason cannot even be initially discovered without leaps of faith proliferating across the surfaces of sentient life. And later, after reason is known and reaches its ‘end’, more leaps of faith will sustain thought and potentiate new kinds of reason that could never have been arrived at by pure deductive/inductive logic alone.

As we see with Pi and the golden ratio, so too in our own reason and thinking; genius is knowing how to dance with reason and faith in the right way, which can only be discovered by… reason and faith.

Dismissal of faith is the exact same operation as what occurs in dismissal of reason.

The key to insight: dismiss nothing.

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This does not change the fact that faith is anti-reason at all.

That you believe you will still be alive tomorrow has absolutely NOTHING to do with reason. You believe you will be alive tomorrow, because you don’t have the courage to face up to death, and we are engineered by nature to tend not to think to closely about our mortality, as living life would not be so easy to do.
The simple fact is that you are wrecked with angst because you are living a lie. Reason tells you that you can’t live forever, but another faithful part of you wishes that were not the case. Result: internal conflict.

And here we see you in the full flood of denial; pretending that tomorrow you will continue to live, when reason tells you that your time is running out.

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In the right way. I agree.

That would not include faith without facts.

The reason that dances with faith must have facts to dance with.

Right?

Regards
DL

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Sometimes one has to leap without foreknowledge of the outcome, that is a kind of faith. But there is always a broader context of space delimited with both a sphere of possibly beneficial change and a sphere of possible detrimental change-- sometimes those spheres can include life and death, at least initially in the pure possiblity. So yea you are right, facts are there in the sense of how we intuitively stack up those reasons for and against to the best we can, but in the end only the leap into the unknown will settle the matter, and it may ultimately come out some way we had not foreseen, usually does in fact.

I seea lot of minds in philosophy that have no faith. That is fine, but there are many heights of thought only to be reached by occasionally taking those leaps.

As Nietzsche said, “The most necessary soul, that out of sheer joy plunges itself into chance.”

16

I am pleased we agreed.

Regards
DL

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There was a report on Radio4 today. I knew this had been happening, but had not realised that the Polio - once thought to have been banished from the world, has made a massive comeback due to Faith.

In Pakistan, Nigeria and a couple of other countries, people have turned away from the advice of modern medicine, and refused to give their children free vaccinations for Polio, with the result that the number of cases has risen.
Imams have spread the lie that the vaccine makes the children infertile. Parents have faith in Islam.