Faith is complete trust, and everyone has faith.
It requires faith to sit on a chair. Because, prior to you sitting on the chair, you do not know whether the chair will hold your weight, despite all the other millions of chairs you’ve sat upon. Unless you sit on the chair itself, you’ll never know whether the chair will hold your weight.
When you sit on a chair, you have complete trust that the chair will hold your weight. We need to apply the same level of trust when it comes to God.
I think faith sprouts from admitted defeat. To admit that no matter how much information we gather, that amount will be infinitessimal in comparison to that which exists (Balance of Mind & Spirit). When one goes unchecked, extremeism infects the being.
I feel that faith is something that is struggled with immensely by intellectuals, but their toil may allow for a healthy and robust harvest.
If you can lay open your soul in it’s vulnerable entirety, then you are showing a large measure of faith.
your faith in the chair is more justified… often so justified that to call it faith is to conflate faith with knowledge…
note that I’m being careful not to say that I know for sure about chairs and dont know at all about god… that’s not what I’m saying…
but that the networks that justify a belief, in the case of a chair, are stronger and more easily accepted by most than the networks that ustify belief in god.
yeah so it may not be a qualitatively different form of knowledge, but its quantiably different in terms of justification.
You never know why someone believes in God. They can have as much stronger personal evidence as sitting in a chair for believing in God. By the way physical is not the only evidence people have for believing there is also supernatural on the personal level.
Trust is something that must be earned by the one seeking to be trusted. Then that trust must be maintained by the one seeking to be trusted. The bible makes clear that faith must be blind and that requiring proof before trust is granted is some type of sin. The faith of the bible seems to be something that only a retard would give themselves over too. Faith is something that must be proven by the one seeking to be trusted or else it has no substance. If Faith is not proven then it is not faith but a failed exercise in hope. Example: Sunday christians hoping that God will hear their prayers and actually do something. Then when nothing happens some will say that they didn’t have enough faith. Unproven faith. Yummy, their stupidity tastes so sweet. Oh, yummy, tears of despair!
The problem with people is that they usually don’t understand that faith isn’t black and white. Having faith in the existence of your chair is very different from the faith you put on engineers when riding an elevator. Faith can be necessary, like the faith in fundamental beliefs, and faith can be misleading. The civilians in the Twin Towers on 9/11 probably had faith that they were safe in that building that morning. Why wouldn’t they?
I wasnt trying to privilige “physical knowledge” over other forms of experience, ways of speaking-thinking… it’s just that chairs are something that we tend to relate to in a physical fashion, and they were allready being used in an analogy.
As it happens I think my point still stands. Even the most religous people have minor lapses of faith… or strained faith… even the most determined roquentinesque panic-attacker still happily sits down to think or eat or write…
and I guarantee that chairs can claim more true believers than god… which was my point… more networks which are more justified to the most people… and a fairly unproblematic form of justification (for what-ever reason because I think they’re the same mental process)
my point was that both are faith, as was originaly contested, but that one (chair) is, to most people, for I think explainable reasons, more faithfully accepted (generaly).
although churches often have those long benches… so mabey they know something I don’t lol.
Ok, the next time that I sit on a god, then I will completely trust that the god will hold my weight. 
The chair thing is a bad anology. Faith in a god(s) is one of the finite contemplating the infinite. There is nothing with which to find a positive comparison. It is a faith not testable in relation to obdurate physical realities (chairs).
I can provide many reasons to have “faith” in a chair. Design, mass, function, all give me reasons to have faith that the chair will or will not support my weight.
Faith in the metaphysical realm is not testable. One makes a ‘leap of faith’ regardless the metaphysical explanation.
JT
Has anyone sat on a chair without faith?
I dissagree. The belief may be about something that, because of the belief, is qualitatively different. However that is circular reasoning. The real lived process of gaining the belief is really rather similar in both cases.
Your beliefs/understandings about god and chairs are what lead you to say they are bad analogies. The ways that we actualy come to know of and understand and believe/accept/reject etc etc are really quite analogous…
they both rely on the incorporation of practices and descriptions and discourses and the drawing upon of networks of these over space and time and experiences and intuitions etc etc.
as ive mentioned I think they are, currently in most western social bodies, quantitatively different in terms of the justifiability of these things in relation to other beliefs and practices etc… contradictions etc etc… chairs are less problematic right now… but the process of belief is not qualitatively different except in the most superficial ways…
would you rather believe in a chair salesman or the bible?
Comparing faith towards God to that of a chair I agree is a very bad analogy. You can actually test a chair before sitting on it.
Jade,
Do your parents have to prove themselves worthy to you in order for you to trust them?
If you are talking about the Christian bible I am curious to know where it makes clear that faith is blind, I must have overlooked.
Proven to your standards of course.
What kind of an example is that? You couldn’t be more stereotypical. If this is the type of “factual evidence” you want from God then I assure you that you will never get it.
not sure what you mean… i only presume that there are people who sell chairs for a living… and I’ve seen plenty of bibles… in hotel drawers, friends book shelves etc…
but I think I’m being a jerk and that isnt what you mean. I suggest that the bible and chairsalespeople are only minor players in your belief in both chairs and god.
Why don’t you doubt whether the chair you are sitting on will continue to hold your weight?
well first off, that question allready assumes that i “believe” in the chair and understand them conceptualy etc…
so its kind of further down the path i think, its like asking “why don’t you doubt that god will continue to hold your weight”… the assumption of gods existence is allready factored in.
but the question is still interesting.
I think it is mainly because, by this stage, I have “black-boxed” the chair to some extent. Most chairs that I sit in I have sat in before or ones very much like them (I might sit somewhere different on a different airplane but i presume a consistency between them for various reasons that we could tediously lay out… perhaps with the help of cognitive psyc etc)
and because of this I assume that they will hold my weight, pragmatically because it is more efficient to do so, because they allmost allways have… etc etc
once we are at this point it is a case of a believed feature of a justifiedly believed-in object (the weight holdingness of chairs)… and my generalisation of this observation into my forms of life… as a feature of practical consciousness.
of course if a number of chairs failed me the black box would reopen and I would begin questioning my psudo, but now fully, conscious assumptions about the features of chairs… or chairs of whatever class had failed me etc etc
but as I’ve said this is futher down the track… like asking about the features of a god that we allready agree that we believe in (which is of course a indespensible way of speaking in most theological circles or none of the discussion will make any sense… just as agreeing implicitly that chairs exist is an indispensible way for chair-salesmen or designers or architects to speak)
In this topic, I try to explain the concept of faith, an explanation contingient on one accepting God’s existence.
hehe. You really shouldn’t have so much faith in the chair. You don’t want to wait for the blackbox to open before you re-examine your faith in the chair. Because, by then you may have fallen and hurt yourself.
But do you admit, sitting on a chair requires a degree of faith?
from my first post:
your faith in the chair is more justified… often so justified that to call it faith is to conflate faith with knowledge…
note that I’m being careful not to say that I know for sure about chairs and dont know at all about god… that’s not what I’m saying…
but that the networks that justify a belief, in the case of a chair, are stronger and more easily accepted by most than the networks that ustify belief in god.
yeah so it may not be a qualitatively different form of knowledge, but its quantifiably different in terms of justification
and from my second:
and I guarantee that chairs can claim more true believers than god… which was my point… more networks which are more justified to the most people… and a fairly unproblematic form of justification (for what-ever reason because I think they’re the same mental process)
my point was that both are faith, as was originaly contested, but that one (chair) is, to most people, for I think explainable reasons, more faithfully accepted (generaly).
Hi rob,
Well, your point is valid to the extent that we assume that faith and belief are the same thing, or that faith lead’s to belief, which in many cases is true. It is also true that the process of approaching faith and belief is very much the same. The difference lie’s in the “proof” of either concept. Having faith, or not having faith in a chair is physically testable, and depending on the results of such testing, belief is possible. Having tested the chair(s) inumerable times, they will/will not support my weight.
Having faith in a metaphysical concept is just that. To be sure, there are those for whom faith in God become’s belief, but it unsupported belief -ie- it is not physically testable.
Attempting to couple a physical referent to a metaphysical concept is to invite someone to suggest that it’s a bad anology.
JT
Do you claim to know everything about a chair?
I am using a physical analogy to justify a metaphysical concept, because the two share the same principle.