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What is Faith? Over the years I have heard many people, who can’t scientifically or logically defend their supernatural beliefs, end up saying they are based on faith. Thus, I came to ask, “What is Faith?” I now argue that faith has a lot to do with what part of the globe a person is born in. That is, if a person is born in a Western country their faith is most likely based on an endless number of Christian religions. If one is born in a Middle Eastern country a person is probably a Sunni or Shia Muslim. And, if one is born in a Far Eastern country their religious faith is probably related to being a Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, etc. I am trying to make a case that religious faith and beliefs are based on childhood indoctrination depending on where you were born. Faith comes from an early time period of environmental indoctrination that leads to a lifetime faith based on a religion’s dogma. Most indoctrination (of any kind) takes place during the impressionable Limbic Brain developmental years from infancy to age 7, and continues into the concrete thinking years of 7-12. Limbic indoctrination trumps Neocortex rationality or listening to intuitive guidance. Indoctrination is about taking a docile child (or adults who refuse to think for themselves) and molding them into a belief system. It systematically ensnares and entraps a child’s mind into believing whatever is put into it. If the seeds of religious indoctrination are planted early enough, all will succumb to unnatural dogmatic proclamations. Religious stamping-in faith demands beliefs and values that can’t be questioned. I warn that childhood faith has dire implications. Absolute faith makes for a decerebralization of common sense, reasoning, the ability to question, and the ability to think for oneself. Religious indoctrination is faith-based submission that has been a deceptive attack on the selfhood (spirithood and personhood) of a child.

alwmjohnson 4 Jan 19
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Buddhist beliefs are a bit different from most others. They are more along the lines of “here is the path to the cessation of suffering, come and see for yourself.”

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You have it sorted, I do not think there are many on this site who would disagree, with most of that. Though you can look at it another way, top down rather than bottom up, and say that faith is the excuse people give when they believe something without any evidence. It is also of course taught as a virtue in the theist religions, and given the second definition, it is not hard to see why.

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I mostly agree that faith is a scourge to rational thought if applied dogmatically in the ways that demand lack of questions, which is typically its role in abrahamic religions. When it comes to eastern religion and eastern cosmology faith doesnt play much of a role at all. It's really sort of a western idea that anything relating to your god should be believed and that questioning would be a sin. In buddhism (or at least mahayana buddhism, the particular type I've studied the most), you are taught not to believe anything that you can't prove for yourself. The cosmology of eastern religions doesnt set any god up as high judge/royalty of a courtroom.

Psychologically speaking I think faith is beneficial but it depends entirely on what you put faith in. I put faith in the fact that the sun will come out tomorrow, the earth will keep spinning, Ill find a way to feed myself and nothing is likely going to cause the end of the world in my lifetime. Ive got faith that every religion trying to sell me any different story than that is doing so for their own enrichment and not mine. My definition of a useful faith is just a somewhat optimistic extrapolation upon evidence, an educated guess that keeps things calmly in perspective. Unquestioned faith is the absence of, if not enemy of rational thought though.

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Agreed. It’s the most widely used mind control device there is. Its primary function is control, so selfhood is an enemy of most religious dogma. ??

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