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A long read but worth the time. AronRa shines a light on the usage of "faith" that is occasionally mis-represented by users on this site. [leagueofreason.org.uk]

NoMagicCookie 8 Sep 10
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My take on faith, especially the religious kinds is akin to " A Group of Blind persons leading each other through an active Mine-field hoping to get safely to the other side."

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Faith is believing without evidence.

Indeed! Even Paul admits in Hebrews 11:1 that faith is not evidence based.

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (KJV)
"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." (RSV)
"Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." (NIV)
"To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see." (GNT)

It all amounts to certitude about what is hoped for and what has not been observed. In other words, faith is wishful thinking and believing in hearsay--nothing more than credulity, no matter what the translation!

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Favorite part? The definitions of faith. It literally states and/or implies in the definitions that evidence is not required, needed or demanded. And yet apologists claim that there IS "evidence" for their "faith." It's all so mind numbing.

Ergo, and legally speaking, just as Faith is soley dependent upon belief without questioning or evidential proof, therefore it is a False Claim, legally, "since ANY Claim unsupported by Tried, Tested, Irrefutable, empirical evidence is NOTHING more than False and thus deserves to be dismissed out of hand as such."

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A tour de force. Thank you for sharing. For those who might misinterpret the author's argument, he begins by writing: "every logical fallacy has been used as an argument for God and every argument for God is a logical fallacy, meaning an argument that is fundamentally flawed, illogical, and thus invalid."

I think this sums it up nicely:

"When one person has a delusion, it’s called insanity, but when many people have a delusion, it’s called religion".

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If the conclusion is this from the article:
"Conclusion:
Faith is a firm belief that is not dependent on evidence."
Then all the preceding article is a complete waste of time and your assessment that "faith" is "ocassionally mis-represented" by non believers is totally groundless.

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You're speaking my language. As a nullifidian, I'm a person having no faith or religious belief. Therefore, I view the very concept of faith as anathema to our existence. Faith is credulity and intellectual abdication, and constitutes a wholly unreliable reasoning process. I agree with Peter Boghossian who states that, rather than being virtuous, faith is a cognitive illness that prompts people to pretend to know things they could not possibly know.

I side with the great orator of the 19th century, Robert Green Ingersoll, 'The Great Agnostic,' who said that faith is 'an unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance.'

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I did not read this but I cannot believe that Aron Ra believes "faith" is in any way reasonable also. The word "faith" is always misrepresented. Idiots want to claim you have "faith" in gravity. WTF?

Perhaps you should've read the article. Ra's conclusion: "Faith is a firm belief that is not dependent on evidence."

@p-nullifidian I agree with that statement because faith cannot be supported by evidence.

Yes, it is a long article, but it covers everything that I have been saying for years.

I must confess to laughing at religidiots who tell me that "[I] have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow morning".

I do NOT have 'faith" in Gravity but I do trust that the concept of Gravitational Attraction between objects exists, otherwise, IF it did not then we'd never have been here to be debating this subject in the first place.

@anglophone Ah, BUT the Sun does not actually rise, LOL, it is an optical illusion created by the rotation of the Earth on its axis and when you see the Sun above the horizon, so to speak, in actual fact it has already been above the horizons for some 8.5 seconds any way.
But I'm just being a wee pedantic here, so don't take offense/umbrage please.

@Triphid Can I offer you this frame of reference? 😉

@Triphid There is no need for faith when it comes to the predictability of physics. We have confidence in the predictability of a given outcome, based on our observations and understanding of the laws that describe natural causes and effects. This enables us to predict with certainty the date, time and path of the total eclipse of the sun in the western hemisphere in 2024. As Spock said in the Star Trek episode, 'Court Martial,' "I speak from pure logic. If I let go of a hammer on a planet that has a positive gravity, I need not see it fall to know that it has in fact fallen."

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I have no time for anybody who tries to pass off faith as being in any way reasonable.

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