Faith? In what?
Leap of Faith–might as well jump over the cliff with Wile E. Coyote.
Blind faith–who determines the direction the horse goes with blinders on?
Dao faith–the hermit or lone guru who refuses to talk teaches only by example. So you ask him, “Why are you showing me isolationism as a means to unification?”
Faith–a word bloated with imposed meanings like a dead horse bloated with maggots. If you can clarify the concept, you can also raise the dead horse.
P T,
That short sentence could be expanded into a hundred pages, but I’m not interested in explaining Daoism here, mostly because I understand but a little of it. Just a couple of things… There are more ways to communicate than running your mouth. What a person understands is how they act out, not their rhetorical skills. You ask of Truth, and I must ask, which Truth? Yours or mine? What is truth (from a Daoist perspective) is internal and experiental. It isn’t an external cast-in-stone principle waiting to be discovered…
Since it’s Sunday, I’ll step into the pulpit for a moment…
Does not the bible offer the observation, “By their works shall they be known.”? If words were what were truly important, wouldn’t that k be replaced by a d? Have christians been misled all these centuries by a typo? Yes, we use language, but language is symbolic, it is not the acting out itself. If you practice golden rule behavior, do you have to tell anyone that is what you are doing? Faith is understanding, but it is our acting out that is the flower of faith, not our words…
Perhaps, usefully, we might distinguish between ‘faith’ construed as ‘belief that x exists,’ and ‘belief that x can be relied upon.’?
When I say I have faith in my doctor, most people would take me to mean much more than that I am affirming my doctor’s existence. My saying as much implies, rather, that I believe there is a relation of trust between the two of us. I have faith in my doctor, not that s/he will keep assuring me of her/his existence, but to restore me to health whenever it is possible.
To proclaim faith in God, therefore, means more than to affirm an existential proposition: it is to signal a trust in the relationship between him and us; that if we need his help, then he will give it (if it lies within his will to do so).
If proclaiming faith in my doctor is not ridiculous or somehow out of fashion, much less can it be when applied to God.
What do you think?
I think I agree with you… Very well put Remark.
I think that the doctor example you gave gives an imbalance… in that you are only a passive participant (a patient).
Is faith in God more than simply being a passive participant who is seeking help?
mmm…
I have a question here… I very much agree with this tentative, but… and a big but…
… If a person does not have faith then how can a person understand it?
How can a person know something that has not been experienced?
Faith in God can simply amount to an expectation of his help; but it need be more than this. Nor does faith in my doctor necessarily mean that I am a ‘passive participant’ in that faith. ‘You will recover if you walk two miles each day, give up smoking and drinking, and take this nasty medicine for the rest of your life.’
I also imagine that we all have experienced faith at some times in our lives – faith in doctors, perhaps, and a child’s faith in her mother, that she will turn up on time to collect her from school. There are countless examples, I think.
On reflection, perhaps we could all understand faith in this sense. Those who decry faith in God take a shallow view of that notion, as if it meant simply a blind acceptance of God’s existence, even in the face of evidence to the contrary (evidence of, e.g., suicide bombers being allowed (by God) to behave as they do, and child molesters, etc.)
Those with faith in God intend it to be understood in the first sense, which covers doing whatever that person imagines God wants of them, even at the risk of suffering agonies along the way, in the belief that behaving in that way is what lies within God’s will.
So, faith does not merely imply “to believe in Gods existence”… It implies an active role based in God whom we trust.
So, this trust implies that something must then be is given up. If nothing is given up then Trust is not possible.
So, trust implies a sacrifice that is not conditional on an exchange. If there is an expectation of an exchange then this is not trust but greed.
So, if there can be no expectation of an exchange… then to expect salvation by having faith is a sin.
So, I can have faith (belief/trust) that God will have mercy on my soul but I cannot expect it of God.
What do you think?
mmm philosophy:
What a fascinating line of thought.
Can I have faith that God will have mercy on my soul but not expect him to have? A good question if ever there was one.
The answer has to be ‘Yes’ IMO. On the notion of ‘faith’ I have sketched, above, it is of benefit to me to believe that my soul will (eventually) be mercifully received by God and not damned. I’d hate to believe otherwise – that, for instance, I have faith in God and yet know that my soul may be damned.
Nor should I expect that my soul will be mercifully received. For if I should, then that would be to take God’s mercy for granted, as if it would be forthcoming no matter what contribution I made (or deliberately didn’t make) to the general well-being of God’s creatures.
And yet, faith in God makes no sense at all if the possibility of damnation doesn’t arise (does it?). Is having faith sufficient for the eventual receipt of mercy?
I don’t know.
Please keep me thinking.
mmm… sounds like we have a conundrum. 
Any one else have any input or suggestions?
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Which Truth indeed. Subjective Truth is yours and/or mine. Objective Truth is all of ours, from any perspective, cast in the fabric of the universe since time began, and presumably until time ends.
Speaking is action. If you tell someone with low self-esteem that they are worthwhile, that could change their whole perspective and thus the actions they take–including what they say. A lot of people have felt it worthwhile to codify (put into words) the Golden Rule. It not only solidifies the principle, it promotes living by it.
Faith–that I will wake up tomorrow morning and face the weather that meterologists have predicted? That’s expectation based on experiencing repetitive phenomena. Kierkegaard, in his dicussion of Abrahamic faith, examines a problem Paul and other NT writers did not consider–how to reconcile a father’s love and need of a son with some god’s whim of testing the father’s loyalty and subservience to himself, which smacks of ignorance of what is human, of inhumane demands, of radical immaturity on the part of the god who needs his ego enhanced. So K. simply calls the whole ordeal humane beyond human reason.
Faith–in what? In the experience of real cause and effect conditions, in the evolutionary plus of human reason, or in a god who has to put people to the test in order to prove his superiority?
Good, I think we’ve settled it. 
I was thinking more in terms that my time has been wasted.
Then why reply? (shrug)
In matters where someone tells me to accept their argument based on faith, i usually don’t reply. (no im lying i always reply, and it’s never pretty)
Now that’s what I would say is a waste of time 
Objective Truth is the realm of science and is discovered via the scientific method, just as subjective Truth is the realm of art. The only argument against objective Truth is chaos, for which I see no evidence–just 100% the opposite with every discovery.
OK. So we have two truths out there. One we can discuss because it is testable. The other, well, since it is only a personal experience, and no one else can have that same experience, then attempting to discuss subjective truths is a waste of time. You will never experience my truths no matter how many metaphors I present to you. My experience will never be your experience. Subjective truths are as Kierkegaard observed: “Silence is truth.”
Not a waste of time, subjective truths can be shared, and inspiring for those that share them. But there’s also the area of the Truth spectrum where objective and subjective Truth is blended–i.e. love and justice. Love is (or should be) an objective commitment supported by subjective emotions such as likability, sexual attractiveness, familial bonds, loyalty etc.
You continue to impress me! Yes both “truth” as considered scientific (objective) and "truth as considered subjective are substantiated by agreement. Since we are both human, you can feel what I feel more often than not. That’s agreement. It has nothing to do with faith other than that we both expect recurrent phenomena to continue as they do unless thwarted by some fluke of nature. And, we have seen enough of chaotic situations–storms, floods, etc., “the best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry”, to see chaos as predictable. On the other hand, the faith expected of Abraham is simply inhumane.
I think this statement to be false. Any respectable scientist would not claim that science is 100% objective truth. Science is the realm of predictions based on probabilities. Thus even the notion of objective/subjective is a probability, even if it is predicted as a 99.9999999999999999% chance of being objective.
An article from the web, Quote:
Source: physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/2548
About the author: Douglas Morrison was a physicist at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, for 38 years