Can we look at FAITH in a more practical way?

by Terry 46 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Terry

  Trying to use logic to create qualifiers for friendship is a slippery slope. Love is not logical, that's not it's nature

  I try to not have an extravagant view of logic beyond it being a heuristic approach to get from cause to effect.

  In other words, if your actions (as a friend) do not match your avowal of friendship up to some minimum standard....the effect is to nullify the friendship.

  What compromise is there between a glass of water and a drop of poison?

  I find that those who strive for intellectual honesty seek clarification while those who tend to want to muddy up things

  with slippery slopes and exceptions hinder clarity, however unwittingly in motive.

  Avoiding absolutes is a great place to start, however.

  What purpose does FAITH serve if not to replace missing elements, namely, facts and proof?

  Connecting the dots implies a space between the dots where information is missing. Faith is that pencil line that gets us "there".

  Love is an appraisal in which we place maximum value on the object of our appraisal. It becomes a transaction demonstrating the magnitude of the appraisal because we trade our time, money, energy and thoughts in much the same way as any other transaction. The more we "pay" the greater the "value" to the one paying.

  All the above in order to say, reality is quantifiable in objective terms while imaginary concepts remain subjective and unprovable no matter how much emotion we attach because we want to value something numinous or transcendent.
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  sabastious

  But Terry, faith doesn't have to be absolute, only assured. Saying faith is absolute will just create an authoritarian structure which will just end in revolution which comes with untold misery and suffering. Being personally assured is the same thing as being confident. Some people are just confident that God exists, some people are confident that Jerusalem fell in 607 BCE. But how far will one take that confidence especially when put up against known facts? What is the difference between one who defends their faith in God and one who defends a flawed historical notion?

  -Sab
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  sabastious

  All the above in order to say, reality is quantifiable in objective terms while imaginary concepts remain subjective and unprovable no matter how much emotion we attach because we want to value something numinous or transcendent

  Yes, but without confidence in our imaginary concepts they will have less chance of translating into reality.

  -Sab
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  Terry

  Some people are just confident that God exists, some people are confident that Jerusalem fell in 607 BCE. But how far will one take that confidence especially when put up against known facts? What is the difference between one who defends their faith in God and one who defends a flawed historical notion?

  There is a saying which I've always enjoyed: Life is what happens while we're making other plans.

  I would amend that a bit.

  Life is what happens while we are believing whatever we want to believe.

  In other words, reality trumps belief.

  We can think what we like but in the end when our beliefs don't match up with real world events we are left holding our beliefs like expired tickets on a flight that never leaves the terminal.
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  sabastious

  We can think what we like but in the end when our beliefs don't match up with real world events we are left holding our beliefs like expired tickets on a flight that never leaves the terminal.

  Without belief we would never have discovered so much about reality. Who cares if some of them fall by the wayside, that doesn't discourage belief, it just shows us that we shouldn't marry ourselves to them. But we SHOULD have them and we SHOULD be confident about it. That's what keeps the world going round, imo.

  -Sab
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  Ucantnome

  You are at a grocery store and notice a spill. You are not an employee. Do you report the spill or trust that somehow one of the actual employees will mop it up? Should you report the spill yourself? Surely, somebody else has already done so.....

  It's not my job, maybe it's supposed to be there.
• 

  Terry

  Without belief we would never have discovered so much about reality. Who cares if some of them fall by the wayside, that doesn't discourage belief, it just shows us that we shouldn't marry ourselves to them. But we SHOULD have them and we SHOULD be confident about it. That's what keeps the world going round, imo.

  I'll be scratching my head on the connection between one and the other, frankly.

  A great many discoveries about reality were happy accidents unnconnected with belief or even a desire to discover.

  The important aspect of discovery is that it is direct interface between our senses and the outside world. All the "imginative" chemistry is after-the-fact.

  On the other hand, science is invested with a lot of trial and error, measurement, predictions-that-fail and retries. Testing our guesses is good policy.

  So, if you want to line up "belief" with "guesswork" I'll have to go along with you on that.

  Same page.
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  Etude

  Faith, whatever the hell it is, is what you must have when you can't explain the source of quantum equations, what explains the equations and why they fall apart when we try to explain the quantum realm.

  Faith is what we lean on when we fail to satisfactorily answer the question why the universal constants (the strong and weak forces that hold particles together) are exactly what they must be in order for us to be here in the first place.

  Faith is what you must rely upon in order to believe that there is an infinite number of universes with every possible combination of different quantum values so that we end up where we happen to find ourselves.
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  sabastious

  A great many discoveries about reality were happy accidents unnconnected with belief or even a desire to discover.

  I'll take every accidental discovery we can stumble across, but IMO that doesn't minimize belief or faith in any way. It just shows that belief and faith are not the end all be all. Logic has it's place and it's definitely a place of great prominence. However, faith and belief don't have to be practical (otherwise you call that logic). In fact when faith and belief specicially are not logical is often when hidden truth can be, and has been, unveiled. I am not content with just hoping for accidents

  -Sab
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  Finkelstein

  The history of faith involving the human experience has alway been an obstructive hindrance toward mankind's

  understanding of himself and the world of which we live in.

  The endeavor to connect to outside spiritual resources to overcome man's problems, fears and ignorances has always lead

  to manifest accumulative amount of problems as a result of this endeavor.

  Better it is for mankind to look for possible answers within themselves in a framework of perceived reality, rather to look for answers

  from supernatural beings sourced from the human imagination.