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When whom you give the first slice of your birthday cake to, is more meaningful than anything else could ever be..
..a tradition, in my family too. 
I apologize for letting you guys waste so much time yammering on about ‘faith’. It is much simpler than you are making it.
Faith is the mode of thinking in which something possible and/or probable is expected or wanted to happen.
But you can’t have ‘faith’ that something that can’t happen will happen. Neither can you get away with the “but it’s not logically impossible for the red sea to be split by some divine power” argument either because that’s an abuse of common sense and it would open the door for all kinds of nonsense.
Religious faith is total nonsense. Scientific faith can be a little fantastic but nothing like religious faith. Scientifc faith is everyday faith in normal shit happening. Conspiratorial faith is very dubious, less so than religious faith (because faked moon landings are more likely than Christian gods) though.
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Religious faith is total nonsense in a Wittgensteinian and Kantian way. It may be that x (““god””) exists, but we can neither know or say anything about it even if it does. By virtue of this, religious propositions can’t exist. There can be statements expressing religious language games and feelings, but these aren’t the criteria for what allows a statement to make sense. “God exists” means absolutely nothing but “Oh Maisy, I thought I’d never see you again. By golly, there is a god!” means very much.
That’s actually religious faith, too. Imagine everything you think is normal suddenly changes, challenging your previous assumptions about normality, which you now see were ungrounded. How do you get grounded again? That’s why there are fine-tuning arguments for God’s existence. What we think is normal does not have to be that way.
Normality is a kindness we take for granted.
It’s kind of funny that the same dude that said we trust that the sun will rise, poopoo’d trust in miracles. (Hume)
Wittgenstein wrote and spoke extensively about God and religious belief after his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but his views shifted dramatically. His later philosophy moves away from the rigid logical limits of the Tractatus to consider religious belief as a practical “form of life,” not a scientific or rational truth claim.
His later thoughts on God and religion can be found in a number of posthumously published works: Culture and Value: A collection of personal remarks and notes from throughout his life, which contains many of his spiritual reflections. Lectures on Religious Belief: Notes compiled by his students from lectures he gave at Cambridge in 1938 Philosophical Investigations: While not focused on religion, this work’s central concepts—such as language games and forms of life—provide the framework for understanding his later philosophy of religion.
In his later period, Wittgenstein dropped the idea that religious statements are nonsensical in favor of analyzing how they function within a community. He no longer dismissed religious language as illogical. Instead, he argued that it belongs to a different “language game” than the language of science.
For Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is its use. Religious statements, therefore, get their meaning not by describing facts but from their use in religious practices and communal life. Religious language is not about proving a theory but about expressing a “form of life,” a shared set of activities, traditions, and attitudes.
Wittgenstein dismissed philosophical proofs for God’s existence as irrelevant to genuine faith. In his view, arguments cannot lead a person to belief, because belief is “not the result of a proof” but is instead based on life experience and upbringing. He contrasted the scientific mindset, which requires evidence, with the religious mindset, where belief is a passionate commitment or a “system of reference”. Therefore, religion as an expression of experience, not a historical claim.
According to Wittgenstein, Christianity is not based on historical facts, even if it presents historical narratives. He argued that religious faith would not lose anything if the historical details were proven false, because belief operates on a different level. For him, religious belief expresses something that happens in human life, like the “consciousness of sin” or “salvation through faith”. I believe this very close to Kierkegaard’s view of Christianity.
Wittgenstein’s private writings reveal a deep personal struggle with religious faith. He was drawn to Christian values and the sincerity of believers but found it difficult to accept the dogma. He famously stated, “I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view”. This strikes me as close to the view of Paul Tillich who defined religion as that which holds the ultimate value and demands total surrender from an individual thus defining their being and purpose in life. Ultimate concern is whatever serves as a person’s true God. It could be money, power, success, or any other finite thing elevated to a position of supreme importance. The concept of ultimate concern highlights that everyone has a religion, as any deeply held concern that determines one’s life is a religious dimension, even if it is not a traditional deity.
Wittgenstein valued religious honesty, once describing the “honest religious thinker” as a tightrope walker with “the slenderest imaginable” footing, who performs an impressive but difficult feat. Even though, as an analytic philosopher, he is often pitted against existentialists like Martin Heidegger, to me he sounds like an existentialist when talking about religion.
Can you please provide a quote supporting the conclusion that Wittgenstein thought this?
Contrast:
“And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.“ - that Paul
“Culture and Value”, translated by Peter Winch, The University of Chicago Press, 1980, “1937”, page 32e
“ Christianity is not based on historical truth; rather, it offers a (historical) narrative, and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life.— there is nothing paradoxical about that!”
And
“Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the Gospels, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this: not, however, because it concerns, universal truths of reason! Rather, because historical proof (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular acceptance-as-truth, not something else.
A believer’s relation to these narratives is neither the relation to historical truth (probability) nor yet that to a theory consisting of ‘truths of reason’. There is such a thing.—(We have quite different attitudes even to different species of what we call fiction!)”
Again, we see he holds the same view of historical truth as Kierkegaard.
You will recall that according to the Bible Paul’s own faith was the result of a life experience—said to have occurred on the road to Damascus.
Damn don’t aks us about Damascus becuz I got baskets of sax bits in racquet clubs, bruhs.
That is the worst job I have ever seen of quoting someone. Fix it.
Also, I feel as if you’re being facetious. He’s basically saying the same thing as Kierkegaard regarding the sense that truth is lived or you know nothing of it. He is not saying that it would be true even if it wasn’t (historically) lived. How freaking ironic would that be?
Can we aks about a dumbass kiss in racquet clubs, sis?
Show me where the quotation is wrong.
As for Kierkegaard’s position on history:
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Let’s go, so.. getting it. 
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Meanwhile.. in Bournemouth.. 
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When life gets deep.. dance
Muslims marching in London, Muslims are ripping down American Flags in NYC, Islamic terrorists are burning entire Christian villiages in Syria. Muslims killing Jews at random in Australia.
Someone posted…This is nonsense.
You commit your crimes and attribute them to Muslims. You destroyed the world with your own hands and condemn Muslims. You are the ones who ignited the First and Second World Wars. You are the ones who destroyed Iraq, Libya, Syria, Palestine and the entire Middle East. You killed the people of Gaza and wiped it off the map with heinous crimes. You attribute everything negative to Muslims. You attribute everything beautiful to yourselves.
For the love of God? Good v Evil?
You choose.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSSL59wD7oU/
So they were happy for a Muslim man to disarm the shooter and save lives but have a problem with a Jewish woman with a keffiyeh? Hmmm
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God helps those who helps themselves.. for how can God save those who are not heading in the right direction..
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Small acts of kindness mean more than the grandest gestures could ever convey.
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But why would anyone create something that needed to be saved? You sayin’ bro-bro did that shit on purpose?! Make us all fucked up so he can play the white knight that saves us all? Laaaaame.
Had God dropped down from the heavens, hovered above you, and laid out his terms - instead of remaining hidden and requiring you to have faith - nothing would change about the circumstances of your choices. You’d still have the instruction and the freewill to choose good or evil, eternal life or damnation, etc.
Why then are the circumstances such that they are? Why is the evidence 21st century man has for god’s existence still and only antiquated text written by superstitious peasants thousands of years ago? Couldn’t god appear over Central Park and get on CNN for the whole world to see?
You’d have to explain why it’s necessary that you never meet god before you die. Why it’s necessary that you have faith and not direct empirical knowledge of em.
When you think about it (as you just did above), you see that there really wouldn’t be any qualitative difference. Now you’re perplexed, but you need not be. I’m only showing you the senseless things that result from an analysis of the consequences of the anthropomorphic conception of god. Ridiculous things happen when ridiculous theories are tried and tested.