You had said, "your idea of faith is basically synonymous with belief." I said it is not. It is a type of belief, the unsupported type. A subset of a category is not synonymous with the category. Cougar is not synonymous with feline.
I think I explained that I make a distinction between irrational thinking and other kinds of irrational (non-rational) conscious content such as sensations, urges, desires, instincts and intuitions. These things are largely desirable. It is not derived from reason. I noted that when they flicker out, suicide often follows. Love is in this category of conscious content - a very desirable but non-rational experience.
It is only in the area of symbolic thought that the irrational has no place. This is where faith goes. It is a type of symbolic thought that avoids reason and evidence. Symbolic thought is how we manage the desirable non-rational experiences in order to maximize the desirable ones like love and minimize the undesirable ones like fear. If we do this irrationally, as with faith, we lose, as I did with my first marriage.
Yes. The mistake was making a decision using irrational thought (faith).
So you say. To me, faith is the willingness to believe insufficiently supported ideas, and is no deeper than that. Neither you nor anybody else including so-called experts on the subject have given me a reason to think otherwise.
I wrote, "Everybody who tells you that they thing the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus is rejecting science on faith," which you know I consider a synonym for unjustified belief (all faith is unjustified belief, and all unjustified belief is faith). That is exactly what these people are doing. I'm wondering if you know what faith is at all if you see that not as an act of faith but rather a lack of it.
Have you seen how faith is defined in the New Testament: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." How wrong can one get? There is no substance in hope, and hope is not faith. Unjustified optimism is, as is all unjustified belief, but not hope, because hope is not a belief at all, just another non-rational denizen of conscious content, and a desirable one. The writer doesn't seem to know what evidence is, either. The word tells you that it is things that are evident, that is, seen. Faith is not evidence of anything. It is a poor substitute for evidence. Yet how many millions see this passage as wise, and its author an expert on faith?
This is what I am rejecting. If it were coming from a therapist, we'd call it psychobabble - words empty of content able to snow many into believing that there's something there even if they can't quite tell you what that is, or why it is considered valuable knowledge.
You still don't understand me. I'm telling you that faith is poor thinking. Now you tell me that poor reasoning has nothing to do with faith. Are we even talking abut the same thing?
If you want to convince convince me of anything, you'll first need to demonstrate that we are talking about the same thing and that you understand my position even if you reject it. Comments like that one suggest that we cannot have a productive discussion (dialectic) about this topic. It hasn't been productive for either of us yet, at least not regarding an exchange of ideas about faith.
You've somehow become enamored of something you call faith, but I don't really know what it is you are advocating for, nor have any reason to value it. I think that you've assimilated the idea that faith is a virtue, but cannot explain why others should see it that way, and just don't to analyze what it really is - unjustified belief, nothing more, nothing less - and there is no virtue in believing something without cause.
