Fate

[leo9]

Faith can be a bad thing, when you let it control your life. Faith says, "This is how things are, and the gods are the cause." Reason says, "This is how things are, so let's figure out why."

Your definition is too limited. Faith is belief without proof. That can be faith in a god or gods, or in science (the belief that science can explain everything is a faith, because it's inherently unproveable,) or in a Cause. In his campaigns for atheism Richard Dawkins is as much a faith-driven man as any preacher.

And absolute faith is a very dangerous thing, but not only religious faith. Some of the worst atrocities have been committed by people with no faith in religion, but absolute faith in a Cause. (It's arguable that this also goes for most of the current crop of terrorists, but let that pass as too tricky.) In my youth this country was terrorised by people driven by faith in the reunification of Ireland. They identified as Catholic, but it wasn't about religious faith: even the Pope couldn't tell them to stop. (What finally stopped them - not all of them, alas - was political negotiation, but that's another topic. )

This is another danger of faith. How many religions are there in the world? How many different belief systems? They generally all have a "reasonable number of people" who agree with those belief systems. Yet obviously, they can't all be right! So which faith is the 'One True Faith'?

Not mine, for sure At most, I'd like to believe it's "one of the true faiths," but the list I'd include is so long that that's not saying much.

The concept of "one true faith" is one of the most toxic products of the Mosaic paradigm. Polytheists, historically, have never persecuted anyone for worshipping the wrong god, though they may insist that you also make offerings to theirs. They might tell a conquered people "Your Goddess is our God's bitch!" but they wouldn't burn you at the stake for denying it. Only the Jews objected to having an image of Caesar added to their temple. When the first missionaries came to Scandinavia, a lot of people were happy to add the Whitechrist to the list of gods they prayed to: it was only when they discovered they weren't to be allowed to sacrifice to the Aesir that the trouble started.

Oh, yes, I've felt awe. Images from the Hubble, Armstrong on the Moon, the births of my children. All were awe inspiring, yet I never once felt any sense of a supernatural presence, or a feeling of worship.

Your loss.

I can understand that feeling. I've felt it myself. No one wants to believe that this is all there is to their life. But making up some comfortable bedtime story, or buying into someone else's story, doesn't change the reality around you. It only makes you feel better, at best.

That "at best" is a lot. And it's a very philosophical argument whether making you see the world in a completely new way is a "real" change. Historically, most of the great changes in societies have begun with a change of belief - people buying into someone else's story. We're only here, in a liberal democratic capitalist society with a high level of technology, because people chose to believe stories that moved them that way. The proof is that people who choose to believe other things have not made that change, and actively prefer the feudal primitive societies that fit their beliefs, and we can't make them change at the point of a gun.

For the worst, one need only look around at the horrors being inflicted on people around the world in the name of one religion or another.

Or in the name of one political system or another. The dangers of fanaticism and the dangers of religion are two different things that only partly overlap.

No, I see it more like your glass having one drop of god-juice left in it, while mine has all been discarded.

But even one drop means you can't call my glass empty, and you can't call me an atheist without bending the word till it breaks. Your arguments are usually so reasonable and well thought out that it annoys me when you talk nonsense.

I, too, struggled for a long time with my lack of faith. While I had no interest in the social activities of a formal religion, I somehow still felt it was wrong of me to just toss everything aside. But then I started to really learn about what I had been taught, and I saw how unconvincing and ultimately unsatisfying it all was. And I finally realized that there was nothing for me to believe in, nothing for me to fear, no reason for me to feel empty. There are no gods. We are here by virtue of a series of cosmic accidents. And we help each other along not because some imaginary being tells us to, but because it's the right thing to do. This understanding was liberating.

I'm glad you are happy in your faith.