What is 'faith'?

[fela fan]

See i wouldn't call it 'faith', i'd call it educated guess work based on probabilty and previous knowledge !

It's only faith if someone thinks of it that way. Weltweit did. But i doubt in those examples the people concerned were thinking of faith. More to do with an adventurous attitude.

Faith in something or someone surely has to have been consciously formed in the mind at the beginning stage of acquiring that faith.

And i'd say faith is an attitude, and therefore it can be replaced with another one, say acceptance of what happens. This attitude to me replaces any faith and renders them obsolete.

 

[weltweit]

It's only faith if someone thinks of it that way. Weltweit did. But i doubt in those examples the people concerned were thinking of faith. More to do with an adventurous attitude.

But faith is also the belief, despite there being no proof, that there is a divine creator and that after your death you will be judged and accepted into heaven or hell.

Faith in something or someone surely has to have been consciously formed in the mind at the beginning stage of acquiring that faith.

It is belief without evidence or proof imho. In fact in the religious example people are required to generate faith in that way almost as a precondition of acceptance in the faith.

And i'd say faith is an attitude, and therefore it can be replaced with another one, say acceptance of what happens. This attitude to me replaces any faith and renders them obsolete.

Don't follow you there.

 

[5t3IIa]

 

[fela fan]

But faith is also the belief, despite there being no proof, that there is a divine creator and that after your death you will be judged and accepted into heaven or hell.



It is belief without evidence or proof imho. In fact in the religious example people are required to generate faith in that way almost as a precondition of acceptance in the faith.



Don't follow you there.

So faith is a belief then? And your example of the divine creator is not faith, just an example of an object of faith. So, i can accept that faith is a belief, and a belief is just that because no evidence or hard facts have come along to convert the belief.

My point was that for someone to have faith in something/someone, they need to have consciously decided that they will believe in it at some point. I thought that point was the beginning of that person's faith, ie, the initiator of their faith.

And therefore, by the rule of opposites, if a person has not consciously formed their faith, then it is not yet a faith of theirs; faith cannot become formed through the subconscious.

My last point: faith is an attitude towards the object of belief/faith. Faith in something or somebody is a belief that it/they can deliver on various expectations the holder of a faith has. Taking your example, getting into heaven and not going to hell, is the expectation of that particular faith-holder.

Whereas, if one takes a different attitude, one of accepting what happens in life, often taken to be fatalism, then there can be no room for faith or hope or belief in something or someone being able to deliver the hoped-for outcomes. Acceptance takes what comes and takes what doesn't come.

Belief, hope, faith, are rooted in future - the expected outcomes are always in some distant time, and therefore are arguably anti-life.

 

[Drone Module]

for me the best description of faith is the phrase the impossible decision for the impossible. this hasn't anything to do with god or the denial of science, nor does it have anything to do with a passive belief in some futurity or regulative principle- though it might come close.

more or less, i take this phrase to imply that faith is deciding something undecidable, so it resonates with Badiou's ethical duty that one does exactly that. but it also implies the Keirkegaardian circularity of the leap to faith, where faith and doubt are mutually constitutive (blind faith thereby being not faith at all.)


in that connection, i resently heard Badiou speaking about communism in terms of a [parapharsed] 'subjective comittment.' so again, faith might be thought as the condition of having a subjective attachment that does not require, or is not subjectable to, emprical testing.

so, contra the last post above me, faith does not require that some state of affairs become present in order to be itself.

 

[bhamgeezer]

Faith is total power trip, the power of unshakable belief, a good way to oneself through hard times or prepare oneself for conflict. A naturally induced drug to strengthen the mind against adversity.

 

[Santino]

It's where Chris Eubank's nose and mouth and eyes are.

 

[kyser_soze]

Faith means going to google and typing 'define: faith' before you start a thread on the subject. At least that will give you a hook on what the idea might mean, if not in any real depth.

Here, I've already done it for you:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=define:+faith&meta=&aq=f&oq=

Interesting that almost everyone on this thread has looked at faith from a purely religious context. What about faith in secular ideals? For the communists, you have faith that at some point in the future Marx will be proved correct and the world will become a better place. Anarchists must have faith in other people, because their political beliefs don't allow for 'upward worship'. Hell, people even have faith in the sports teams they support - it may be faith tempered by reality, but the supporter of a club that endlessly fails to achieve surely has some part of them that thinks, at the start of the new season 'Maybe this year is the year!!'.

Or:

 

[Drone Module]

What about faith in secular ideals? For the communists, you have faith that at some point in the future Marx will be proved correct and the world will become a better place.

i don't think this is correct, especially not communists today- at least those philosophically oriented. at minimum, there is a recognition in most british and european communists that communism itself exists only as an Idea. there was even a conference in london not long ago called "The Idea of Communism" the very basis of which was the idea that everything previously calling itself communism has been foreclosed. essentially, we are in the situation where everything must begin again. today, the very idea of the future is in crisis. and not because we have reached some 'end of history', but precisely because history- or this current historical sequence- cannot end or, more accurately still, we are no longer capable of imagining what this end would mean, resemble and be.

aside from that, as i tried to articulate in my post above faith does not require any kind of future state to embody its promise. faith does not operate in the manner of a financial speculation; it belongs to another, ecstatic order of speculation. communist faith does not care whether Marx's predictions* are correct, nor does it require them to be.

rather, the communist attaches themself to the idea of a just, equal society regardless and (as my emphasis on impossibility was intended to point out) even because of its impossibility. faith operates as a subjective relation to ideality rather than as an objective relation to materiality.

[this is further confused when one considers both ideation objects and material objects to be equally Real.]


[*as a note, Marx's forumation of the inevitability of communism was based on what he regarded as a thorough understanding of material conditions, and therefore he would not admit any degree of faith was involved. he was extrapolating from given information rather than prophecying.

Hell, people even have faith in the sports teams they support - it may be faith tempered by reality, but the supporter of a club that endlessly fails to achieve surely has some part of them that thinks, at the start of the new season 'Maybe this year is the year!!'.

thats an interesting point, though i don't know if i'd want to use the word faith for it. i'd say that this is more about the function and form of ritual as a mode of patterning a life. it seems to me that whether you are following football or watching X-Factor or betting on the dogs you are engaged in more or less the same activity.

 

[Drone Module]

Faith is total power trip, the power of unshakable belief, a good way to oneself through hard times or prepare oneself for conflict. A naturally induced drug to strengthen the mind against adversity.

against that idea stands Kierkegaard, for whom doubt was the essential moment that made faith what it is. if you're faith cannot be shaken then what you have is dogma, not faith.

also, doubt operates as moment of suspension wherein one's faith is put under question in order to be tested. the result is either reaffirmation or abandon. essentially, without the moment of suspense wherein everything is shaken you do not have faith.

 

[kyser_soze]

[*as a note, Marx's forumation of the inevitability of communism was based on what he regarded as a thorough understanding of material conditions, and therefore he would not admit any degree of faith was involved. he was extrapolating from given information rather than prophecying.

Well of course he'd say that, he was seculariing Christianity. Just because you think you've got a load of 'real' evidence that something will happen doesn't mean that faith isn't involved.

 

[Drone Module]

Well of course he'd say that, he was seculariing Christianity. Just because you think you've got a load of 'real' evidence that something will happen doesn't mean that faith isn't involved.

sure. but if we want to follow that route we have to consider that the Enlightenment as a whole is a secularisation of Judeo-Christianity.

in which case we'd have to affirm that the scientific method is itself an article of (secularised) christian faith.

i'm not sure i have a problem with that really, but i can imagine alot would.
---

i should also point out i'm a communist (of sorts) and fully endorse the idea that i am so on faith.

 

[kyser_soze]

By and large I have no issue with any of that.

 

[Drone Module]

then we're agreed.
the only thing left is to go to the pub, sit in the corner and glower at everyone around us. thats what i like doing anyway.

 

[NoEgo]

Faith occurs within the framework of an absence of acceptance.

Faith is often more meaningful when 'blind' is put in front of it.

Faith is dressed-up hope, and belongs to the same family of 'desire'.

Faith in something or someone is based on a happening or state of being in the future and hijacks the present.

It really is best to eliminate faith from one's life. The only good i can see is that it blocks one from reality.

Actually thinking about that, perhaps that's quite a benefit!

A lot of people would find that comment negative fela, although I understand what you mean. What about in those desperate situations in life where you have absolutely no control over your outcome, isn't "faith" useful then?

 

[NoEgo]

Faith is total power trip, the power of unshakable belief, a good way to oneself through hard times or prepare oneself for conflict. A naturally induced drug to strengthen the mind against adversity.

This is where I see it's use. Not to be confused with hope of course.

 

[Brinxmat]

Faith is what spans the yawning gap between what you know to be true, and what you hope to be true.

As in, I have faith in Roy Keane as manager of Ipswich Town. I have faith in his managerial skills to rescue us from our worst start to a season...ever.

 

[ChrisFilter]

It's my Mum's middle name.

Thanks,

Chris

 

[Drone Module]

edited because mother jokes are silly

 

[Gmart]

The attractive one from Buffy?

 

[Gmart]

Having faith is believing in something even when there is no direct evidence that it is true. There is no evidence but still you believe.

This is the basic definition I would use ^^

Any faith can be seen as stupid, which is why the nihilists, who refuse all faith in anything, are the only ones who are consistent.

A certain Phil Dwyer on his Rational Proof of the Exstence of God thread seems convinced that faith is stupid in itself and that there is a way to use logic to rationally prove the existence of God - from his thread:

Only an idiot would believe anything based on faith.

Which seems a bit facile...

Look, with all respect, don't you think it's a bit daft to dismiss the likes of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard etc etc as self-deluded "thinker-provers" who just believe stuff because they feel like it?

And while I respect these people's contribution to Western thinking - it is falacious to say that therefore they aren't full of shit on whether God exists. One has to feel sorry for the older philosophers who didn't live in a globalised world, where the dubious stories are that much more obvious due to media than they were when the only people you really knew were your neighbours and community and they were all christian etc...

You don't have to agree with them, of course. But as soon as you actually sit down to read such people, you will immediately be struck by their utterly ruthless and unremitting application of reason and logic. You will be also struck by the complete absence of "faith" from their arguments.

So the question is whether their logic is solid or not - we wait and see for Mr Dwyer's long awaited conclusion - but I wonder how we can apply logic to the concept of God at all? Are questions on the ineffable able to be judged with such a tool? And is our obsession with the questions of our existence leading even our greatest thinkers into logic which is questionable:

Why do you think there are ontological questions that need answering? I would suggest that the fact that questions are raised by the very nature of the human condition (and they most certainly are, as your post clearly indicates) is itself evidence for the existence of God.

Which is a great example of one's faith (in his logic) or agenda (to use another word) leading him by the nose away from logic... (I am suggesting that it is not actually evidence for the existence of God at all).

And i'd say faith is an attitude, and therefore it can be replaced with another one, say acceptance of what happens. This attitude to me replaces any faith and renders them obsolete.

Isn't acceptance just another form of faith? - just one where you turn a blind eye to the future and simply live in the moment?

My point was that for someone to have faith in something/someone, they need to have consciously decided that they will believe in it at some point. I thought that point was the beginning of that person's faith, ie, the initiator of their faith.

And therefore, by the rule of opposites, if a person has not consciously formed their faith, then it is not yet a faith of theirs; faith cannot become formed through the subconscious.

I don't think you can divide the conscious and subconscious so easily - there are things which we acknowledge as faith, but there are others where we simply believe in them because we always have - as we get older the enquiring mind will address most of these issues and turn the faith from subconscious to conscious.

Acceptance takes what comes and takes what doesn't come.

Belief, hope, faith, are rooted in future - the expected outcomes are always in some distant time, and therefore are arguably anti-life.

I don't think you can completely replace faith with acceptance. You would still need to have a basic faith in certain things, such as the laws of physics holding true, or that your friends won't suddenly attack you for no reason. That said, I have few if any problems with replacing fear with acceptance.

Faith is total power trip, the power of unshakable belief, a good way to oneself through hard times or prepare oneself for conflict. A naturally induced drug to strengthen the mind against adversity.

Sounds a bit blind - I would suggest a basic faith in non-violent principles as a default position.

Interesting that almost everyone on this thread has looked at faith from a purely religious context. What about faith in secular ideals? For the communists, you have faith that at some point in the future Marx will be proved correct and the world will become a better place. Anarchists must have faith in other people, because their political beliefs don't allow for 'upward worship'.

I agree, there is a basic question as to whether you have faith in your fellow man or whether you live in fear as to what your fellow man is up to. As William Gladstone said:

Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; Conservatism is distrust of the people, tempered by fear.

This for me is the basic division in politics.

against that idea stands Kierkegaard, for whom doubt was the essential moment that made faith what it is. if you're faith cannot be shaken then what you have is dogma, not faith.

It is not necessary to constantly reassess one's articles of faith over and over throughout your life - you are allowed to come to a conclusion and if the topic comes up in conversation thenyou can defend it - taking what conclusions which come up on the chin with an open mind.

 

[IMR]

Faith is believing in something for the sake of it.