Cite? I've been playing drums in church praise & worship bands for years (see: this thread). Different churches, different pastors, I attend the services, I attend the Bible studies, I know about this stuff--I'm not just making this up. If there's something that has bothered me, for years, it isn't just something I'm making up. It's something I've observed and really struggled with.

What I "insist" is that people use words as what they actually mean, instead of back-peddling their belief system into a semantic pretzel which they have reverse engineered in order to wrap duct tape around conflicting sets of information.

I can't believe I've gotten so tail-posted in my own thread. To be honest, I'm not even sure what's being discussed in here. Somehow what I just posted, combined with my initial post, appears to amount to:

"It's okay for me to do it, but I don't like it when you do it. And mainly I just don't like what you're calling it."

You and I may be doing the same thing, but when you use the word "faith" a giant red flag goes off in my head. I, myself, would be embarassed to associate myself with the accumulated idiocy that has been proudly attributed to "faith" over the centuries. I'd rather scrap that word than try to write a custom definition.

I can totally see that. But I would also be embarrassed to accidentally get associated with Troubleshooter's hardline-opposing position on the whole thing. Do you have suggestions for words which would better reflect a non-fundamentalist position? Isn't it fair to want to "take back" the word from the idiots who misuse it?

I think the idiots are using it correctly.

The give me another word to use. I'm guessing you won't like "inductive reasoning."

I have no problem with the phrase inductive reasoning, in and of itself. I like how it means inductive reasoning, so you can call it that... and it means that. I like it when we call things what they are, so we can know what they mean.

...but what if you don't agree that what he induces is reasonable?

Troubleshooter,

Faith is not a suspension of the need for an explanation. It really makes no sense to suspend that need. From my point of view, I really don't understand why anyone would need to suspend the need for an explanation. In fact the more I think about what you may be trying to tell us with such statements, the more I think they are just a bit silly.

From my point of view, you have no experience with faith or the spiritual. You are talking about and putting down something you have no experience with, in fact in such conversation you are on the outside looking in. You appear to be as close minded and intolerant as some of the religious people you don't mind insulting. If you came to my job and started putting down and insulting my professional methods, only to find you you lack the experience to make such statements, I'd dismiss you out of hand. Oh, you read an article about some crazy guy in the papers, that's what you know about my job??? Yea, I'd dismiss what you have to say out of hand.

I'll not call you crazy because you don't hear and see what I hear and see, please allow me the same courtesy and tolerance.

Who then *would* you call crazy? How about the person who sees phantom clowns which he claims instruct him to perform various nonsensical tasks? Should you extend him courtesy and tolerance to his clown-centric faith or try to help an obviously diseased mind? Does your societal duty to help cease if the damage is not physical?

It is my understanding that our perceptions do not widely differ; you distinguish the world in the same basic manner and precision as I do. The difference is that in your view there are "extra" elements. You claim events happen for a reason or are caused by an entity despite no perceptive indication. You base the validity of concepts or actions solely on events or feelings that occur completely within your own mind.

How then would we distinguish your behavior from that of a crazy person?

Purely a matter of numbers and time. If enough people suffer the same delusion for long enough, it becomes a valid way of viewing the world.

@ Troubleshooter. I disagree slightly with your definition of faith. It is not belief without the need for explanation. It is belief without the need for proof. Religion is nothing if not an explanation of life.

How do we distinguish your behavior from that of a crazy person? Same either way.

So, here we go again, nonsensical clowns, can we not go to the far extreme of an example when talking about having faith?

Dana, belief without the need for proof. I was a serious agnostic a long time ago. My experience has given me proof. I suppose there is this craziness you could ascribe to me. It is proof none the less for me.

Ahh, but they *don’t* suffer the same delusion, just the same type of delusion. If we could run double-blind trials and verify that the faith experiences you experience and we cannot detect are shared and consistent among others then you would have a point. Unfortunately that isn’t what we see; for some people it is clowns, others unicorns, and they only start to become somewhat consistent when you put those people in communication.

Besides, if we could provide solid statistical support to the idea of faith then it would cease to be faith by your definition. Those statistical studies would become proof.

Come on now, that isn’t extreme at all. Faith is what is extreme; the clowns just sometimes insist that you eat a few paper clips, and they really only hang out in closets. The rest of the time it is no big deal. Faith on the other hand is justification for an entire moral code, and ascribes meaning and purpose to every event in the world. Just because you have faith and don’t see clowns does not make the clowns more extreme, I don’t see either.

I'm willing to take an honest look at it, but I'm not walking into the analysis with a prefered outcome, which happens to coincide with a massively widespread belief system that has been propogated by hook and/or crook.

I prefer to let the evidence do the talking instead of working backwards from a fixed position. And that's the real difference--science doesn't have "faith" in a preferred outcome.

True

Just a outdated one in my opinion.

Oh I agree.