Adoption isn't related to biological lineage.
OK. Jesus was anointed. He had oil rubbed on him. That may be necessary but not sufficient. David was anointed. You're anointed: "And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee” (
2 Corinthians 1:20-22)."
I didn't say that. I said that believing by faith is an alternative to justified belief, where justification is according to the standards of critical analysis of evidence. A belief is something one holds to be true, a claim about reality. All such beliefs are either justified or unjustified. The later and only the latter comprise belief by faith. Either one can demonstrate a claim to be correct
Yes, and when they do their academic work, they leave their faith behind, or else they come up with something unacceptable to academia. Newton was able to compartmentalize his faith when he worked out his celestial mechanics until he ran out of math, and then invoked faith. His work up until that point remains valid today, and is indistinguishable from the work any sufficiently talented atheist could have generated. His leap of faith has since been discarded, namely, that God nudges the planets to keep them in orbit around the sun. Also, all of his work on alchemy is rejected, a faith-based pseudoscience.
Disagree. Faith is not part of my life or my relationships. All of my beliefs are based by experience.
I've done it, and so have many other critical thinkers who love.
I trust my wife, but not by faith. She's proven herself trustworthy. If I had acted by faith, I might have asked her to marry me on our first date, before I knew her, since she was fun, smart, clean, and attractive from that first date. But I didn't know her yet. There was no track record yet. When there was, I did ask her to marry me. My belief that she would probably be faithful was based in experience. Acting on incomplete information is not believing by faith. If something is 90% likely to occur and one knows that, acting is not on faith, even if the outcome is the less desirable and less likely one.
Faith is extolled by religions that require it to be believed. It is called a virtue, and labeled pleasing to God. But it's nothing more than the will to believe with insufficient evidentiary support. And clearly it doesn't deserve that respect. Faith is unexamined belief, the shallowest of experiences essentially, the most unexamined of beliefs. It cannot be a path to truth except by incredible blind luck, and even if one guesses the truth correctly, he cannot know it until evidence revels it to be that. There are orders of magnitude more wrong guesses possible than correct ones, and any of those wrong ones is just as easily believed by faith as any correct ideas, with nothing to indicate which is which. You've guessed that a particular god exists absent sufficient evidence to justify that belief. You could just as easily have picked any other god, and combination of gods, or no god at all.
It's analogous to picking lottery numbers and believing that they are correct in a fair lottery. You're just guessing, and there are orders of magnitude more incorrect guesses that correct ones. And there is no way to tell which guess is correct until after the drawing, at which time believing you have the winning ticket goes from faith to evidence-backed fact.
Let me share a story. I mentioned that I'm happily married - 32 years last week - but this is not my first marriage. At age 18, while an atheist in the Army, I met a Christian girl also in the Army, who brought me into Christianity. I recall sitting on the barracks stairs with her one evening several weeks or months into our relationship, when the appearance of crepuscular sun rays filled me with the apprehension that the Holy Spirit had chosen her to be my wife. We eventually married. Unfortunately, being a good Christian, we had not had sexual relations. We didn't live together, and we both wore military uniforms in the day and Levis at night. I never saw her cook or clean or shop, because we didn't do those things living on base.
Well, the marriage was a failure. We were sexually incompatible - I liked it and she didn't. She was eccentric and pathologically cheap. She wanted to grow wheat for bread in our postage stamp backyard to save the cost of bread. We had nothing in common but Jesus, and that wasn't enough. She was so cheap that I couldn't get her to go out to dinner with me until I bought one of those coupon books for local restaurants that lets you get a free meal of equal or lesser value along with a paid meal. I would tell her, I'm going out, and I'm going to order a nice meal. You can come along for a free meal or stay home, I told her. Only then could we enjoy a meal out together, and frankly, I don't know if she enjoyed hers knowing that I paid more to eat than was absolutely necessary. And unsurprisingly, she was a hoarder.
I just couldn't live like that, and eventually got out of the marriage, a marriage that never would have happened if I had based the decision on evidence rather than faith. Faith is a terrible idea, and I paid a price to learn that. I guess it wasn't the Holy Spirit after all, or else He's a poor matchmaker. I eventually returned to atheism, went to university, learned critical thinking, and realized that believing by faith is a logical error, a fallacy that leads to non sequiturs and unsound conclusions.
And right there is the beauty and virtue of faith.
