i find the "do you believe in love" thing funny. and how it's used to make faith appear more rational
Then you misunderstand the point that was being made if you think it was simply made to promote a belief in some supernatural entity. At the outset this thread was not meant to be a do you believe in God thread, but whether you had faith in anything outside of yourself. The point was that we have faith in many things, so that having "faith" is not irrational.
Funky made two comments:
I don't think I ever really had faith. I always believed what the available evidence compelled me to believe. ANDAfter having a long-held belief overturned by the first appearance of evidence, wouldn't you be very wary of believing in something unproven ever again
Those comments prompted my question about love, contrary to what anyone would like to believe, love cannot be proven with a capital P, it can be inferred, it can be assumed but in no way is there a scientific method of PROVING that someone loves you, ergo, you go on faith. The point I was trying to make is that we humans operated on faith in many ways, in the mundane things as Doogie pointed out with his remote to basing our life on the faith that our significant other truly loves us and wants to spend their life with us, to things that science tells us that we as individuals can't verify (ie. I believe in the theory of relativity but the maths to prove it are far beyond my reach) so I take it on faith.
So the point is and was that faith is with us in many ways, and that if we only believe that which we ourselves can prove or verify we won't be believing in much. The question regarding love was not to make faith in a god appear more rational, but to illustrate that we operate on faith on many levels, both in our secular life and for those of us that have a spiritual life. If someone wants to see that as rational or irrational that's up to them.