dkv - I'm glad to see somebody offering a deeper analysis of what "faith" might mean. I wish that more of my neighbors were willing to think about faith in the terms you outline.
REP: Thanks.
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You have to understand, though, that those of us living in the US are surrounded by very literal-minded Christians for whom the word "faith" means unquestioning belief in the inerrancy of scripture, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Every day, we see people who deeply want to believe that Genesis is an accurate history and that "God" is a human-like (but perfect-in-every-way) being who directs individual human lives, punishing people who disobey.
REP: Every religion has this problem so need to blaim Cristians.We all have to realize this truth.
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What's worse, this group of idiots is gaining a lot of political power very quickly. Many of them, Bush and his puppet-masters, for example, are politically very savvy despite their drooling stupidity, because they understand how to take advantage of people emotionally. I have had many conversations with fundamentalist Christians about this topic and I have always come away feeling overwhelmed by the utterly simple stupidity of their theology (for I hesitate to call it philosophy).
REP: Politics with Exclusive ownership of God is suicidal.Direct confrontation is inevitable when Faith A comes across Faith B.Obviously God didnot do so much of hard work to start a fight on its existence and defintion.( I have used religion to argue because we are discussing religion and not science.)
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[By the way, I personally have never knowingly spoken about the meaning of "faith" with a fundamentalist Muslim, but it appears to me, admittedly from a distance, that many of them are similarly literal in their interpretations.]
dkv is quite right to remind us that, when we talk about destroying faith as a guiding principle, we may be falling into the same trap as our foes: a too-simple and too-literal interpretation of the meaning of "faith." The brand of faith against which I will always fight is this: unwavering, unquestioning, uncritical Belief in something, despite a lack of empirical evidence or empirical evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately, I have to report that I encounter this literalist brand of faith every day.
REP: They need to be educated for their own good.
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I disagree with you, dkv, when you say that science is based on faith. You are right that individual scientists often believe the ideas of others without having personally examined the research. However, we do so not with faith, but instead with a very defensible trust in our system of peer review. There are individual scientists with good reputations who are frauds, but there is very good reason to believe that these people are few and far-between; the peer review system is designed to be quite efficient and ruthless in ferretting these people out. If there is a scientist making claims that seem questionable to you, you can easily go and read their papers to judge for yourself whether their ideas should be taken seriously. That's scientific method; scientists trust one another (always tentatively), but we do not have faith in one another.
REP:Science allows you to examine itself and I think most religions allow this as well(of course using its language).
Science when encouters an evidence against a theory it changes its understanding but not its application achieved till now radically.
Religions also undergo this change(although no one will admit it openly.)Religions grow and this is reason why we have so many of them.
Most do not loose their applicability and this creates a superficial conflict.People practicsing it refuse to acknowledge the superior understanding of some religion over the other.Religion writers made this mistake and we are paying price for it. This event has nothing to do with what we were trying to acheive and that was to understand what God is saying.
