The Trouble With Faith

• Religion is just a group of people who believe in a particular set of ideas about the world, largely without facts. The concept of faith is a troubling one on a number of counts.

• There are times when one just has to believe their life will improve from where it is today, that some good will come of a bad situation, or that they will succeed in something important to them. That is optimism or hope, not faith. Faith is an entirely different beast that involves believing very specific things that aren't the least bit plausible. It's also usually “believed” at emotional gunpoint – the beliefs are often pushed by family, and the person is taught that failing to believe will have disastrous consequences.

• Blind faith is the direct download of information and concepts (whether true or false) without any scrutiny. That's true if you blindly assume everything in the bible is right. Maybe I have to give credit to the cherry-picking that I despise so much because that's certainly better than taking the bible completely at its word like the most militant Islamists do with their books. If you accept your holy book unconditionally, you're letting something into your core without the normal intellectual or moral filters. The fact that loved ones push this on you just means that it was pushed onto them, too – probably when they were too young to reason their way out of it. Thinking of it in terms of a computer virus is apt here. Please see the Religion's Holding Power section for more on that.

  • I think most people would agree with me that accepting facts blindly is very troubling when it comes to cults. Almost any outsider will wonder why the affected person can't see how they've been brainwashed into believing something utterly ridiculous and dangerous. Well, do you think a Christian and a Muslim might feel the same way about each others' faith or the faith of a worshipper of Zeus or Thor? Generally, they will reject the others beliefs without a second thought. Atheists simply choose 1 less religion than anyone else, pending further evidence. Atheism isn't even a way of life or a philosophy, it's simply choosing 0 religions instead of just 1. The faithful believe everyone else is completely off their rockers if they believe differently. Well, so are they...and in exactly the same way. As soon as you can tell me why you reject all other faiths, including Thor and Islam (or Christianity), you will know why I reject yours.

  • People can be unscrupulous. That's been proven in a lot of ways, but let's consider computer hackers specifically. A found security gap is an exploited security gap where the reward is information, money or anything else of any value. Guess what, faith is like a big, open access port for the unscrupulous.

    • Think about how priests have been trusted implicitly and have abused that trust in droves.

  • Religion has a large side that's always been about money and power. This is a big business that employs lots of people...and it's tax-free. If you don't think it draws more than it's share of the immoral, you're sadly mistaken. I'll share lots about that later, but do a web search on Marjoe, an evangelical con-man. Here's a link to start: http://www.vice.com/read/marjoe-director-sarah-kernochan-talks-about-her-incredible-doc-on-the-evangelical-conman-456. Everything, down to the timing of the music can be manipulated to maximum financial effect. Do you feel taken yet?

  • The acceptance of these stories and morals of old is dangerous even without the unscrupulous. That's because humanity keeps progressing, but religion and the “lessons” within do not.

    • Religion is a vestige from the past. In order for it to make any sense in what's mostly a modern age of reason, it both requires and propagates the ignorance (and often the intolerance) from the past. That's what religious people are doing when they lash out against science. They're trying to bring us backwards to a time when religion and superstition provided the best explanations we had for the world. The more science progresses, the more we know. The more we know, the less space there is for the ignorance and superstition of the past...and for god. Also, the careful scrutiny and adaptability to new facts that are the hallmark of science create a caustic environment for religion. These religious people are selfishly trying to hold everyone back so they can keep their “god high” and keep that “certainty” of an afterlife going...and perhaps to stay on their judgmental high horse. They should be ashamed. They need to stand on their own without their crutch and pick a more reasonable way of being.

    • Religion is like a time capsule of old ways we've grown beyond. If you dug up a time capsule with an 8-track player, would you start using that in place of your MP3 player or streamed music? If you found descriptions of medical procedures in the capsule, would you assume those were the best medical advice available? Why should morals be any different? Across generations, we've refined our morality, generally in a positive direction.

    • There was a morality study done by George Tamarin on a group of Israeli children. They were split into 2 groups, and one group was given the story of Jericho (Joshua of the bible killing everyone in a city to claim the territory because god told him to), and the other group was given the same story with the names of the people and places changed. Each group was asked if Joshua's character behaved rightly. Because of their religious upbringing, the children found the original story of Jericho perfectly acceptable. When they did object to something in the story, it was about “contamination” and other concepts they were taught instead of a proper moral response. The children in the other group (with the version of the story with names of the people and places changed) had a proper moral response. More can be found at http://saltysleveen.blogspot.com/2007/01/joshua-jericho-genocide-and-fallacy-of.html and other places.

      • Clearly, the religious education of these children caused them to view a story of genocide as acceptable and even good...as long as it was their god ordering the massacre and carried out by their people. This is an example of how religion can completely nullify morality, and it's done it over and over, generation after generation. Do I need to go over the number of religious battles in the world and how each side dehumanizes the other?

      • My wife's view on this study is that the kids given the unaltered story answered as they did because of “familiarity bias”. Even if that were a factor (or even the ONLY factor), does anyone see the problem with exposing children to a story of genocide enough that they become desensitized to it? Again, indoctrination of children is the problem here. Repetition of this type of story is another example of how morals are eroded by religion.

• Peter Boghossian argues that faith is the act of “pretending to know things you don't know”. This is a bitter pill that the religious resist, but nobody's come up with any form of answer for it that I've seen. After all, it does match the definition of faith where you believe without (or in spite of) evidence. Maybe they want to claim that faith is another way of “knowing” certain “facts”, but if you factor in all the cults and religions and their conflicting beliefs (some within the same faith), that's simply not possible. A Muslim and a Christian, both possessing faith in their contradictory teachings, can't both be right. As I mention elsewhere, there's no way to reconcile 2 (or more) faith-based statements that directly contradict each other, so there's no way to honestly claim that they both know true “facts” through their faith. Some beliefs of the faithful, if not all of them, are false. At the very least, this makes faith an extremely unreliable way to “know” things. How can some of these “facts” be false while others are true even though different people hold different, contradictory "facts" to be true with absolute conviction? Do the Christian and the Muslim live in separate realities yet interact like they live together in one? That would be very Matrix-like, wouldn't it?

  • Are we all good on the idea that faith is the the act of pretending to know things you don't know? It describes faith more clearly than the faithful themselves do. The next logical step is to drive it home by putting it into practice.

    • “My faith in god is the cornerstone of my life” translates into “Pretending to know things I don't know about god is the cornerstone of my life”.

    • “Teach your children to have faith” translates into “Teach your children to pretend to know things they don't know”.

    • How about filling in your own faith statement here? __________

• Again, faith cannot differentiate between 2 rival claims. It has no mechanism to do so. That doesn't provide much hope of us ironing things out, does it? If you've decided to be religious, how do you choose??? Most people just take on the beliefs given to them. That is weakness, but it's easy to see how it happens considering how we've honed religion to indoctrinate the young.

• Combine limited resources and irreconcilable beliefs, and the certain result is WAR.

• The religious talk about extremism being a perversion of faith. NO, the texts that support it are right there in the bible and other holy books. It's even worse in the Muslim faith where the books are more radical and less ambiguous. Just like there's no objective way to decide between (or reconcile) different faith traditions, there's also NO way to determine where the boundary of extremism is. What's more, the very act of faith, believing without evidence, opens one up to all sorts of things. Taking in something without scrutiny is a pathway that's easily manipulated, especially when there's so much dark stuff in the bible and other religious texts already. We've clearly been wrong for many generations, and we've continued to propagate the wrongness to the next generation.

• Remember the story in the bible about the Tower of Babel? In the real world, we've been divided by different religions far more than by different languages. Languages can be translated, and non-verbal communication can bridge some gaps. Religions, on the other hand, can't be reconciled, and they're a far more effective way to divide people. It truly is “god” dividing us.

• God stopped the Tower of Babel but not the space shuttle? If that tower had gotten high enough, the workers would've run out of oxygen (problem solved!), and we know Heaven isn't in the sky for someone to climb or fly to. This is just one more ridiculous story.

• Allegiance to a sports team is often like religion. It has more of an emotional component and less of a logical one. Are the athletes on your team especially deserving of a championship? How about the team's owner? Most people like a team in spite of its owner, and that's who a championship helps most, in very real financial terms. I quasi-justify being a quasi-fan of the Packers because they don't have an owner.