Quote: (12-09-2014 04:01 AM)2Wycked Wrote:
I'm struggling with this because of a few reasons: what exactly counts as faith, why is faith necessary for these higher order moral (ethical?) imperatives and how does this fit in with mainstream religious/moral approaches to life?
Specifically, why do the concepts of courage and selflessness require faith? Does it require us to believe that faith means that we believe in world beyond our mortal comprehension? Does faith require us to believe that our acts speak to eternity -- that what we do echoes in a flat circle? Or does true faith revolve around our belief that the world is fundamentally good, evil or morally ambiguous?
What exactly is faith?
Does a man have to accept -- on faith -- the concept of eternity to achieve higher levels of awareness or actualization?
My answers are very unique, and I will try to compress them without providing copious background information.
Eternity is real, so "faith in eternity" doesn't make sense to me. This is because cereal, ovens, and apples are all real, so it doesn't make sense to say I have "faith in cereal" or "believe in apples".
Eternity is the simple inference that what we do now will have long-lasting effects on what comes later. Humans are prone to faithlessness when they deem their lives too fleeting, and too powerless, to make a long-lasting impact. But this faithlessness is just a blindness to eternity.
Bacteria are small and their lives are fleeting, but their presence (or absence) can either benefit or extinguish the lives of many, many men. Bacteria are eternal, despite their smallness. So why not infer that we are eternal, despite our smallness?
Who you are now lives long after you die. Whether in the genetic material that lives on in your descendants, or the teachings that influence people 500 years from now, you will still "be here" 500 years from now.
So Eternity is a simple, logical inference. It requires no Faith, just Patience and Focus. (If you learn enough about life, whether through biology, politics, history, or just-living, you'll eventually infer the existence of the Eternal.)
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Faithless people try to solve problems that cannot be solved, and try to bully everyone around to acquire more things "right now". They reduce their own lives to the pleasures / pains of the moment, because they're blind to Eternity.
And so we need Faith, simply because Faithless people are assholes. And to speak an Eternity-based, patient, compassionate solution to a crowd of Faithless individuals invites bullying and violence.
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As just one example, the AnonymousConservative blog has a myriad of fascinating (and, at times, highly technical) articles on a small part of the brain called the Amygdala. The Amygdala has one job: to fire whenever something is wrong. And it will fire in response to "wrongnesses" as small as the disorder of a closet to as large as the Eric Garner video.
The smaller a person's amygdala, the faster their amygdala will "tire out" in response to a wrongful stimuli. And worn-out amygdalas produce a short-circuiting in the brain that produces violent anger and (sometimes) violent behavior. In colloquial terms, a worn-out amygdala means you will "lose your shit".
Who has the smallest amygdala? Narcissists! They can only function under very-specific (and highly comforting) environments, because the smallest wrongful-stimulus will set them in a rage. These assholes can perform a weird behavior right in front of you, and then deny (convincingly!) that they never did that - because they would never do that! Their inability to accept the smallest wrongful stimulus causes their brains to "re-wire" themselves, literally blinding the narcissist to many wrongful stimuli, particularly those related to self-concept and realistic-assessment-of-their-abilities.
Who has the second-smallest amygdalas? Liberals.
But the Liberal explanation is a little trickier. There are two contrasting reasons to help someone: (1) You really care about that person, and want to uplift them. (2) You're really disgusted / overwhelmed by their neediness that you just want them to GTFO. The smaller a person's amygdala, the more likely they'll choose the second reason. But that second reason is both self-centered (rather than focused on the person you're trying to help) and completely unconcerned with actually helping. So it literally doesn't care whether the proposed-solution actually works, because it's more concerned with distancing itself from the problem - which is why Liberal solutions almost never work, almost always involve "someone else" solving the problem, and almost always involve "threatening people" who don't agree.
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So, to me, Faith is just the natural occurrence of having a larger amygdala. (You can enlarge your amygdala by deliberately exposing yourself to stressful / fearful situations, and discovering that you can handle them. Competitive, sportive, and even violent conflicts are amygdala-enlarging.) You participate in Life long enough to see that the "bad parts" are really all that bad, and you especially resist "quick-fix" solutions that are likely to make the situation worse.
Most Faith involves either: (1) admitting that you're too stupid to solve the problem, and admitting that this, in itself, is never something to be angry or upset by, or (2) allowing smarter, more focused individuals to ponder the problem - i.e.: scientists. Since both of these aspects require a focus away from the fleeting negative feelings of inadequacy and urgency-in-the-face-of-suffering, an Eternity-focused approach naturally strengthens these undertakings.
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Lastly, I'm still rather annoyed that Religion has cornered the market on the terms "Faith" and "Eternity". I hope that scientifically-grounded atheists will accept these terms, (rather than lampooning them as "superstition"), and align them more closely with reality.