Quote:
Originally Posted by Miss Hepburn
However, the statement is flawed because I can believe this chair will hold me...but I have never experienced even anyone sitting in it!
It is a blind, unfounded belief or trust.
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You are conflating trust and faith.
Trust is a reasonable expectation based on actual experience. You've sat on tens of thousands of chairs by now, in nearly as many situations. That's why you trust a chair will hold you. Indeed, it is why you will spot the occasional chair you DON'T trust because it doesn't fit the pattern of trustworthy chairs.
Faith is a belief you hold on someone's say so or your own desires without requiring any experience or knowledge.
Faith can be reinforced by seeking out experiences that reinforce it ... and if you are one of those folks who readily has positive subjective emotional experiences then you can stimulate those experiences and credit them to god or whatever. In every case where I've encountered people who are enthusiastic about their faith in god it is because they get a lot of emotional "juice" from it and can self-select positive experiences in favor of negative ones. I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with that, just that it's not universal.
People like me are left with emotional associations that come mostly from consequential life events and because people are wired to notice negative events (threats) over positive ones, we're left with a net balance of negative life experiences which serve as a source of cognitive dissonance that can only be resolved with a sufficiently potent rationalization. When your rationalizer (tm) eventually wears out then you simply jettison the belief system that produces the dissonance, for one that does not.
Once you get used to the absence of cognitive dissonance you grow rather attached to that absence and see no reason to return to it because your life is ever so much better without it.
My guess is that isn't a problem you needed to solve; you are a person who is naturally high on life because of personality and biochemistry (or if you weren't always that way you simply learned how to manipulate your own tendencies in a better way). You could just as well ascribe your happiness to a dozen other ideologies relating to magic crystals or unicorns instead of god and it would still work for you. You just need a little something to hang your hat on.
I'm not suggesting you should do it any differently; it's clearly working for you and I'm guessing it's largely working for those around you. I'm simply explaining why I don't buy that it will work for anyone. Everyone's boat floats differently. It's easy to say "x worked for me, you should do it to" but it doesn't necessarily follow. There's nothing wrong with your joyful take on things but then there's nothing wrong with me needing things rendered comprehensible and explicable as a precondition to taking them in, either.
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But belief in God is something that is entirely personal.
