What is the basis for faith?

Post Reply New Topic

Yes, but the detractors are saying it was all their imagination. They understand logic well enough, but spiritual things are not in that realm. That means Jung and Campbell are not acceptable.

A believer says oh look a miracle just happened. Somebody prayed for me and my slipped disc has been healed.

The atheist says no it only hypnosis.

Hypnosis can heal a slipped disc then?

The atheist says then you must be a liar. You were imagining you had a slipped disc.

The believer says but it is on my medical record, I was examined by a doctor. You have no reason to say I was not healed.

The atheist says it isn't possible. It isn't possible because God doesn't exist.

But God is a God of the impossible. Now you, sir, deny my healing, which I know I have received. I was in pain with a slipped disc and now it is back in place.

Well it just moved by itself didn't it.

How?

We can be certain that science will find the answers to these questions.

When?

We don't know, but the logical answers will come.

There seems to be a lot of circular logic and even belief in both the defense of a belief and the defense of non-belief.

I'm not Buddhist, but I like the Buddhist teaching that says, "Believe what you know to be true." This puts the onus of faith on the individual and that individual's experience, not in a Creed or the need to prove anything. To me belief is like this, very personal. I'm quite gnostic in that I think one has to "know" for oneself in order to truly believe. I've had many Christians tell me of experiences that were the basis for their belief, some of them mystical, in the form of visions and so forth. I believe them. I don't have to be a Christian to believe them, that their beliefs are right for them. But their beliefs aren't right for me. (I've also known non-Christians who've had mystical experiences that support their non-Christian beliefs.) I have my own path to tread as far as belief, my own gnosis.

I think the basis of faith is the need to have questions answered.

This. There is little ( * see PS * ) or no faith involved in believing in things which I see, hear and touch etc, ie. concrete things in here and now. There is a small amount of relatively easy/automatic faith involved for me in believing in the existence of India, which I have never seen with my own eyes, ( but have read about, etc ), or in the sun rising tomorrow, ( which is in the future, but has happened over and over again without fail till now ).

But believing in god, as I have done for short periods on and off over the last 4 years, is really interesting precisely because there is no concrete or habitual reason for me to do so. When I believe in god it does several things:

It challenges every other belief that I have in absolutely anything which is not right here right now

It makes me more aware of all those automatic habitual now-knee-jerk beliefs that I have picked up along the way since birth from my parents, teachers, playmates/friends, society, media, and my own experience, beliefs which I have often/mostly carried on holding despite receiving no further evidence to justify my faith in them.

It produces an extraordinary sensation of relief, of safety, of ( bizarrely like described on the "packaging" ) "coming home", of finding a haven ... and I think that this has something to do with how it casts light on all the other, very often/mostly scary beliefs that I hold which are based on one off or rare events/experiences or on what other people told me in my childhood etc, and which I have barely begun to scratch the surface of with questions, and which frighten me, and hem me in, and paint the world in distorted nightmarish colours and shapes ...

Believing in god makes it possible for me to know/feel/believe that all those mostly unconscious/unquestioned but limiting scary beliefs may have very little or no concrete support/proof/basis in concrete reality.

Belief in god is two fingers at the tyranny of the "map" over "the territory", so widespread that most/many people tend to confuse the two.

But I don't do it, believe in god, all the time. In fact this last year or so until just a couple of weeks ago, I had almost forgotten about it. :lol It's fun rediscovering it tho. :lol

PS. Some thinkers have said that even what we perceive in the apparently concrete "here and now" involves belief/faith in many many social constructs, various ways of seeing things, categories of experience ranging from colours to "emotions", etc so this belief of mine, ( that there is no faith involved in believing in what seems to be here and now ), may itself be an illusion. :lol
.

Last edited by ouinon on 03 May 2012, 1:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

But to believe in God one must have faith faith is so much stronger then skepticism

I don't know what you mean by skepticism being "stronger" than faith. ?

I do know that the first time I "decided" to believe in god felt very frightening, like leaping off a cliff almost. I *knew* that there was absolutely no "concrete"/usual reason to believe in god; that was what was so alarming.

Almost all of the rest of the time we *believe* that we believe in things because there is "evidence" of some sort, despite the fact that very often, perhaps in all cases, there is no evidence, nothing but knee-jerk conditioned responses and perceptions, based on our human tendency to create meaning, to see/pick out particular patterns and connections from the infinite number of connections between everything, to see and hear the world according to second-hand unverified knowledge, and to believe whatever is necessary to protect other already existing, and cherished, beliefs, etc.

Believing in god felt very weird, and hugely liberating, because deliberately choosing to believe in something while knowing full well that there is no evidence at all for its "truth" is so totally against the rules. :lol
.

Last edited by ouinon on 03 May 2012, 1:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Having no believe in a afterlife seems scary to me the reason why faith is stronger we live ver fear free lifes much like a athiest does but most atheists do not die one many convert on their death beds. And plus the faithful never fear death and live longer lives then those of no faith many saints lived to be in their 100 or more then that most of them are in good health in body and in mind. It is a psychological beneifit having faith.

I think faith is a way people shore up the things they don't know about and can't know about.

In a way but also not in a way it is true you see I view faith as seeing God those who do not have it can't truly know God it takes faith to be religious.

Two-parter:

I heard something suggested before that I hadn't to date and found it quite an interesting proposal: faith and belief are essentially different things. What's meant by that: belief is belief, faith is practice. You can practice, not feel any particular way or even feel like its BS, but whether you even believe in what you're practicing or not has no bearing - that its the action that counts.

As far as how people would 'believe' that there is a higher power - a couple ways. Some people, like you'd cite, are just cultural. They were brought up think a certain way, they haven't tasked themselves to challenge the notions that they were brought up with, and they perhaps never intend to or never will. Then, more interestingly, you have people who get bowled over by too many anecdotes to be persuaded that the system we live in is accurately one of reductive materialism.

Think of it like this: you hypothetically have anecdote that's too compelling to ignore. In that position the question stops revolving around whether the universe *needs* a God and starts from the other direction - ie 'knowing' (or at least believing with that much assurance) that there is a God and then trying to work backward to figure out what 'this' is and what its purpose is, and all the other crazy-complicated questions including theodicy. To be in that position doesn't require arriving at the existence of God from finding a mechanistic need for a God, rather it comes in with the rest of the data and the person in question who has little or no doubt of the divine is really just left reconciling two things that - again, in their own mind - they know to be true. From that perspective whether both the nature of physical and reality and deity are loaded with wild paradox doesn't really matter because the relationship of the data force both through as given reality.

Does that help any?

I love this post

I love this post

Looked at that way my choosing/deciding to believe in god was itself an act of faith. It certainly felt like it.

PS. And it definitely had a knock-on/ripple/reconciling effect; I stopped believing in contra-causal-free-will almost overnight, which was a profound relief; I hadn't even realised how much my ( unquestioning/automatic/knee-jerk/socially-conditioned ) belief in that had been weighing me down. :lol
.

I fully agree. To this date I have no idea how contra-causal-free-will could exist. We have genetic inputs that largely determine our processing apparatus, we have inputs that in sequence both shape our apparatus and bring us to a given point (software), and then we have output where - neither owning the input nor the processing we don't own the output either. To go contra-causal is to act on 20/20 hindsight at the moment of decision making with data that doesn't exist to you. Its like running Windows 7 on your computer and having your computer do OSX work before you ever installed OSX on the side.

If there's no soul - there's very clearly no such thing as contra-causal free will. At the same time though, even with a soul, a God, and even with what people would like to call the 'supernatural'; it adds more 'chaos' appeal, complexity, and less predictability from our finite insider scope but - it still does nothing to offer support to the concept of contra-causal free will, it simply seems to add more moving points and layers to causal free will; which is simply saying that something does what it was predetermined to do by acting on the stimuli that will either give it the best outcome or giving the reaction that says "I'm too tired to fight anymore and something has to give - let it all burn!".

Yes! Great post. Interesting what you say about faith being practice. I've used Sanskrit mantras and prayer beads for a few years now as a practice, which I started when I was experiencing a lot of anxiety. The practice has helped me with centering and calming, and I've considered it important to know something about the meaning of the mantras I use. But I wonder if I'd get the same benefit from using "cauliflower" as a mantra. Maybe I should experiment.

I've also found prayer to be comforting, especially those times when I poured out my heart in prayer. But I also find cathartic journaling to be helpful, and wonder is it simply the catharsis that helps? Is it the prayer at all?

I'm not sure where my need to believe comes from, but I know the moment that I began to believe. I grew up in a family that called itself Christian but didn't practice or attend church. I clearly recall one day when I was four, hearing my sister talking to my mother in the next room. I think my sister had been asking my mom about God, and the subject drew me out of my focus on something else, and I RAN into the next room to hear what they were saying. To me it had the importance of, say, seeing a strange light in the sky. I had to know what they were talking about, even though I had no reason to really understand the topic. I've had some form of belief ever since.

That is not what most atheists say. Most Atheists say I do not believe your god exists. Which is a statement about his own state of belief (or disbelief) and has little to bear on whether god does or does not exist.

ruveyn