Faith
 

I have a question for Saya (and I suppose anyone else who wants to answer it).

Why is Faith good? Is there anything endemic to faith, anything positive about it that you can't get anywhere else?

I'm not trolling here, I'm serious. I'd really like an answer, and so far everyone I've asked has been unable to answer.

Induction is impossible. Thus every act is an act of faith.
First make a meaningful separation between everyday faith and religious faith, or religious people will have the upper hand on the matter of faith.

Why ask me? I don't view faith, religious or otherwise, as inherently good or bad.

Because you study religion, so I thought you might have been exposed to an argument for religious faith that I haven't thought of. I'm working on a play right now where a Character has to make an argument for religious faith, and I'm having trouble making an argument that I consider to be strong.

Right now, all I can come up with are appeals to emotion.

Alan: I meant religious faith in the context of this argument. Having faith the the sun will come up the next day, or that my heart won't suddenly stop beating for no reason isn't as interesting to me.

Faith being good or bad depends on exactly what it is you have faith in I think. If what you have faith in is bad, for example, it advocates violence or intolerance to others who don't believe as you do or something similar, I can't see how anything good can come from that faith. It only promotes a cycle of violence and damage that is hard to break if you are conditioned to believe in something without question. The only real application I can see for religious faith is people being good people because of their faith. That said, I would question how good a person really is deep down is if they only behave with good intentions because their faith tells them to. Beyond that, I have no idea because I have no religious faith and never have done.

A strong argument for religious faith... Any form of faith is based to an extent on emotion.

However the best I can come up with is that religious faith has been used to perform great act of kindness to others, though at the same time it has been used to perform great acts of evil. There again religion is an institution as far as I am concerned and institutions are easily manipulated by those whom hunger for power and are ruthless enough to seize it at any cost.

An argument for religious faith that is strong... it gives hope to those whom otherwise would have none.

Is hope alone really a strong enough basis to have faith in an all powerful god in the sky though? Sure, hope is a powerful thing but I don't think it's hope alone that drives people to embrace religion.

It was a source of great strength to members of my family in dark times, if not to me. If anything their faith gave them hope and drove them further into faith.

Give a man hope where before he had only despair and he will embrace it, becoming a fervent supporter of its source. I can offer a few examples in historical terms.

Not really. The first thing they tell you in religious studies that we won't spend time arguing over whether a religion is true or not, and for the most part we don't impose moral judgements. The closest we got to it was in a course I did about women and religion, where we looked at feminist arguments that said religion is too patriarchal for feminists to ever participate in, and religious feminists countered that making their voices heard in religion and reclaim the tradition is the only way to make it more egalitarian, Judith Plaskow is a good reference for that kind of argument.

I think the kind of debates over the morality or goodness or usefulness of faith while wrapped up in rational talk, comes from a very emotionally invested place, so I don't see the problem with recognizing that.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, I just don't see that hope is the driving force for everyone who embraces religion. I can see that for some, it is the basis for their faith but for others, I think there's more to it. Perhaps it's the feeling of belonging to a group that believes the same as you. I really think for some people, it really is as simple as that.

But what is the fundamental difference between having faith in causality and having faith in a personal god?

Hmm, you are right MissCheyenne. However in terms of an argument, it is the one that is strongest from the perspective I'm coming at this from. Though perhaps I should hunt for another way to approach the matter. The problem we have here is that we are trying to give a rational argument to what is, in essence, an topic bound emotion.

I've always wondered if people have hope because they have faith or if they have faith because they have hope.

I think the two are inextricably linked. I know my parents have faith because of hope but at the same time their faith gives them hope. Its hard to explain.

If I'm not mistaken, Thangbrand would have not tried to REASONABLY rationalize his faith to the Norse dudes.

Unless you're talking about Ulfer. If you are... that's not exactly religious faith. That man has a very calculated plan because he KNOWS how potent religion is on the mentalities of his day. He has faith that what he was doing was simply useful. It didn't really mean he actually believed in the myth of it all.

It gives worthless folk hope.
What's wrong with that?

I'll let Franz Fanon answer that:

The colonized subject also manages to lose sight of the colonist through religion. Fatalism relieves the oppressor of all responsibility since the cause of wrong-doing, poverty, and the inevitable can be attributed to God. The individual thus accepts the devastation decreed by God, grovels in front of the colonist, bows to the hand of fate, and mentally readjusts to acquire the serenity of stone.

What about when the colonized holds on to their traditional religion, like Vodoun?

The magical, supernatural powers prove to be surprisingly ego boosting. The colonist's powers are infinitely shrunk, stamped by foreignness. There is no real reason to fight them because what really matters is that the mythical structures contain far more terrifying adversaries. It is evident that everything is reduced to a permanent confrontation at the level of phantasy.

Fatalism=/=religiosity, and is really besides the point as those would would pillage and plunder in the name of their god would pillage and plunder in their own names.

Kierkegaard does a decent exposition of religious faith in particular, beyond our faith in the axiomatic and the empirical.

Kierkegaard is an idiot. And seeing how Fanon didn't mention anything about pillaging and plundering in the name of God, it's evident that you don't really know what he's talking about, but are rather parroting a rehearsed 'defense' of religion. Your argument shows quite a bit of ignorance of both sociology and history.

I don't think its merely that. I just took a course on Disney and religion so its what's fresh on my mind, but look at the story of Pocahontas. I always thought it was a super racist movie, until I did this course and it was pointed out that historically, Pocahontas converted to Christianity and married a white man, that part I knew, but what I didn't know was that after she died she was used as a justification of colonialism and Native assimilation, as a savage woman willing to accept Christianity and become civilized. Disney consulted with Powhatan natives when they decided to do the movie, and instead of Pocahontas converting, she is reclaimed as a spiritual woman who actually ends up converting a white man. This upset some really right wing Christians, who were appalled that Disney didn't show how savage the Natives were or how Pocahontas converted, their Pocahontas gets lost. It wouldn't have that much of a powerful snub if Pocahontas became atheist and decided both sides were stupid.

And with Vodoun becoming Voodoo, the Africans taken to America hung on to their own religion, but also appropriated the Christian religion as their own, and the Haitian Revolution began with a Voodou ceremony. Religion has been a site of oppression for them, and then became a site of resistance through which they were successful.

Not only does it "lower" the Powerful and the Noble (who are above the colonized), but as quoted, the ego of the colonized is "raised", because now the worthless can believe they have worth, the ignoble can be noble and the poor can be rich, without earning or inheriting it as the truly Noble and Powerful did.

Funny how atheism takes away the poor's belief of considering themselves equal to the rich, and theism makes rich and poor equal.

I should attempt to be objective: theism instead separates based on the faithful (the "good") and non-believers (the "evil") to separate and wrest control from the rich and powerful. The Church seeks to supplant the noble with itself through changing the benchmarks, good and evil instead of noble and ignoble.

Except that religion is merely a superstructure and thus it doesn't create a more egalitarian society but merely masks inequality by proclaiming equality of souls over equality of lives.

Agreed, the main point of my post was Des' original post: justification (from the perspective of a faithful who is defending his position). Equal value of the poor with the not-poor can be a strong argument. EDIT: Even if a mask.