Is Religious Faith just another Religious Myth

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Having religious faith requires some combination of ignorance and self-deceit. Either I don't have the information that I require to make an informed decision and so I just go with the teaching, or I do in fact possess a significant degree knowledge to bring to bear but am afraid to face the resulting conclusion, and so I opt to live a lie, namely that I prefer ignorance to truth. In either case I am living an untruth, however comforting.

So it seems to me that religious faith is largely a myth, hence we hear discussions about "Faith and Reason" owing to the fact that they present opposing methodologies to dealing with a claim. There really isn't any faith, rather ignorance or willful self-deceit that results in an acceptance of a belief.

A child who believes in Santa literally has faith in Santa.

 

[rousseau]

It depends. Do you want to grant the person of religious faith their own free-will and sense of self? Then sure, in this light their faith is a kind of.. thing that happens, a part of human nature. In the same vein the person rationalizing their faith has their own, disparate goals.

From my personal perspective I've let go of the idea of what people should be like, or who we should be. The atheist, or rationalist tends to dream of a world where everything works by reason or logic, but to me this is just as dogmatic of a view as religious belief. That's not to say we shouldn't strive to be reasonable, but I also think it's an unreasonable expectation for a species that is made out of matter, and who shares ancestry with monkeys to transcend the more superstitious and unreasonable parts of it's own psyche.

Why not just let people be who they are, and do what they do, and enjoy them from that perspective, rather than spending our lives obsessing over how what we do is innately wrong?

 

[southernhybrid]

Religion is mythology, but some humans seem to need it to thrive, so I don't know if I'd say that the faith itself is a myth. The faith gives them comfort. When it stops providing comfort, they might search for new answers to age old questions. They might regain their faith at later time, find another religion, lose interest in religion or become an agnostic or atheist.

I don't think my mother had doubts about her crazy beliefs, but unlike some of her church friends, she was more inspired by the Beatitudes, than by the concept of salvation, along with the harsh vindictive nature of her god, as that character was sometimes portrayed. I guess she tried to play down those things or not obsess over them. I do think, despite her ability to make rational decisions about many other things, her faith was real to her. Is that what you meant by asking if faith is mythology? I wasn't exactly sure.

 

[Politesse]

If you want to just use terms whimsically and without regard to their common definitions, sure.

 

[DBT]

Faith is by definition a belief held without the support of evidence. A faith based belief may be political, ideological or religious, or just someone being convinced that they, in spite of the odds against it happening, are going to win the lottery.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Humans are gifted (or cursed, who knows) with the explicit knowledge of death. But we spend inordinate amounts of time and mental effort in ignoring, staving off, and ultimately denying that knowledge. How many humans come to say what Leonard Cohen said near the end: "I'm ready to die"? I have heard residents in nursing homes tell me that they were praying to die, but that comes, I think, from loneliness, illness, fatigue, and seeing life narrow down to a few basic routines. Before one reaches that point, death is what happens to someone else. It is hard to personalize, and it is almost impossible for a sentient being to conceptualize the end of sentience. It is incoherent, as a conscious process, to hold an image of one's consciousness being annihilated. So man, in the hamster cage of his consciousness, invents the escape clause. We don't die, we have souls, our souls are us somehow, they will go on. We got 'em, but chihuahuas, honey bees, and flamingos don't.
This, in spite of all evidence to the contrary -- the all-important soul is invisible, has no mass, cannot be found in surgery. Somehow it's there. It contains your knowledge, memory, and moral sense. Never mind that science locates sensory, memory, coordination, and cognitive functions in various specific sections of the brain. No matter that injury or disease of the brain can wipe out these functions, and that advanced senility can erase the personality entirely. No, there still has to be an immortal soul to make the story work. (Some believers have a fantasy worked out in which you may die in illness and old age but be restored in the after life to some ideal age. You'll meet all of your deceased friends and relatives, too.)
Whether this should be defined as myth or mass delusion probably depends on how much deity narrative is added to it. A soul and a heaven require a back story, so the great religions of man step in. All sorts of extra folkloric stuff gets into play. The in group needs an outcast group, so there's usually a narrative in which only certain people get the first class accommodations after death. The head deity can't be a newbie, so it turns out he (he's also a guy, so I presume there's a penis on him) has been around since the start of time and creation.
Is there a central irrationality in people? Is the knowledge of death so insurmountable?
Having completed my screed, I can only say that there's a chance that I (not you) will escape death. You: not so much.

 

[Atheos]

The word itself (faith) is ambiguous at best. The christian religion as a rule reveres it as some sort of virtue. The irony to me is that there is the implication that being someone who has faith makes one a better person than being someone without faith. But then others turn around and say things like "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist," implying that withholding belief in gods somehow requires having faith in something else.

From my perspective it is no different than believing in Santa. As long as a kid believes in Santa the visits continue to come and the presents magically appear. Once the kid stops believing in Santa the presents still show up but the kid understands there's a much more plausible explanation for their appearance.

Why is it that believing something without evidence makes someone a better person? How is that objectively any better than withholding judgement about the truth of a claim until sufficient evidence comes along to verify that it is true?

It's certainly better for the snake-oil salesman if you believe his claims without doing some fact-checking. But it's not better. In fact it would probably be better if everyone was so vigilant about fact-checking that there was never an economy for scammers.

 

[ronburgundy]

Faith is belief without empirical or rational support, and often in contradiction to such. Contrary to what many apologist say, this notion of faith is well supported by numerous passages the Bible, and it's direct opposition to reasoned thought highlighted by the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther: "Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”

That quote highlights a core defining feature of Christian Protestantism, anti-intellectualism. The RCC controlled schooling, learning, and theology. It was never sincere in it's pursuit of "knowledge" beyond controlling scholarship to support the faith based assumptions of the Church, and therefore it's authoritarian power. And although Church scholarship was often pseudo-intellectual, in the desire to cast away the authority of the Church, Protestants also cast away approaching the subject of God and religion via intellect that the RCC laid claim to and emphasized the emotionalism that is at the heart of "faith". They found lot's of support for this anti-intellectualism throughout the OT and NT, from Hebrews 11 "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." and Proverbs "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding." to James 1 "But let him ask in faith, with no doubting".

In fact, there are Historians/Sociologists, such as Hofsteader, who theorize that the high level of anti-intellectualism in American culture (it's not new) is rooted in it being so strongly shaped by Protestantism that tethered it's anti-intellectualism to nationalistic pride. There was no dominant church, so countless leaders and sects emerged. They competed for adherents by being more staunchly "Protestant" (and thus anti-Catholic and and anti-intellectual) as the next, promoting that what makes America so great is that the RCC never had power over it.

Anyway, back to the OP, you seem to be suggesting that "faith" isn't real. That seems to confuse the fact that faith is belief in things you have no basis to think are real with the notion that faith itself isn't real. But faith, used in the epistemological sense, is a psychological process, so it is "real" in the same way that delusions and lies do actually exists even if the things they claim are true do not.

 

[southernhybrid]

Faith is believing something that you know ain't true. Mark Twain

Is that what the OP is proposing? That people say they have faith but they really know the things they believe aren't true?

I don't think that's the case for most Christians. They really believe the shit they say they believe, but since they don't have the evidence to back up their claims, they say that they believe these things through faith. When they have doubts, friends or ministers tell them they need to have more faith.

Whatever......

 

[DBT]

Faith is believing something that you know ain't true. Mark Twain

Is that what the OP is proposing? That people say they have faith but they really know the things they believe aren't true?

I don't think that's the case for most Christians. They really believe the shit they say they believe, but since they don't have the evidence to back up their claims, they say that they believe these things through faith. When they have doubts, friends or ministers tell them they need to have more faith.

Whatever......

I think that Twain's wording goes a fraction too far. Yet faith and doubt do go together. Not having sufficient evidence to support a justified belief, it's inevitable that doubt arises from time to time, then suppressed.

Maybe this element of doubt represents Twain's 'knowing it ain't true' - that deep down the believer knows their faith is not justified.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

It depends. Do you want to grant the person of religious faith their own free-will and sense of self? Then sure, in this light their faith is a kind of.. thing that happens, a part of human nature. In the same vein the person rationalizing their faith has their own, disparate goals.

From my personal perspective I've let go of the idea of what people should be like, or who we should be. The atheist, or rationalist tends to dream of a world where everything works by reason or logic, but to me this is just as dogmatic of a view as religious belief. That's not to say we shouldn't strive to be reasonable, but I also think it's an unreasonable expectation for a species that is made out of matter, and who shares ancestry with monkeys to transcend the more superstitious and unreasonable parts of it's own psyche.

Why not just let people be who they are, and do what they do, and enjoy them from that perspective, rather than spending our lives obsessing over how what we do is innately wrong?

That's not a bad way to think about things, it can bring a lot of personal peace, but I wonder if it accomplishes anything beyond that. Maybe faith is part of this approach in that it lets live but hopes for the best. In other words if a person likes knowledge they can only go so far if they continue to live in a cave. They may come up with different ideas about what the moon is and what those points of light are in the night sky but they won't ever understand cultures on the other side of the globe or read Shakespeare.

The truly great loss, however, is about potential, the things that could have been but were never even thought about. A person of faith as I've described it would seem to be afraid of things new, more inclined to say those are the works of evil spirits, not things good. We hear persons say that god didn't want us to know this or that.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

The word itself (faith) is ambiguous at best. The christian religion as a rule reveres it as some sort of virtue. The irony to me is that there is the implication that being someone who has faith makes one a better person than being someone without faith. But then others turn around and say things like "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist," implying that withholding belief in gods somehow requires having faith in something else.

From my perspective it is no different than believing in Santa. As long as a kid believes in Santa the visits continue to come and the presents magically appear. Once the kid stops believing in Santa the presents still show up but the kid understands there's a much more plausible explanation for their appearance.

Why is it that believing something without evidence makes someone a better person? How is that objectively any better than withholding judgement about the truth of a claim until sufficient evidence comes along to verify that it is true?

It's certainly better for the snake-oil salesman if you believe his claims without doing some fact-checking. But it's not better. In fact it would probably be better if everyone was so vigilant about fact-checking that there was never an economy for scammers.

I think there's been a lot of selection pressure for Santa like belief. It's basic, emotional, doesn't require much effort, and it probably levels the playing field with regards to survival when it comes to differences in cognition. Faith in Santa and faith in a god are identical, they just happen at different stages in that cognitive journey. Faith is more akin to a kind of trust in one's limited knowledge, even if subconscious, probably no different than dunning kruger.

A person drops Santa or Tooth Fairy faith because a better explanation comes along, more knowledge is acquired. If a person doesn't drop faith in a god it's because better knowledge has not come along for that person. How is it that that does not occur? How is it that people explain "complexity" by inventing something infinitely more complex without recognizing the cognitive conflict? Obviously they are still experiencing a cognitive deficit, simply a difference in their brain architecture and operation.

A profound secularizing experience in my life has been marrying into a family in which one of the siblings was mentally handicapped owing to being starved of oxygen at delivery. Only in the past several years has his devotion and belief in Santa waned. It seems so anyway. But it is quite revealing to watch a person in their 50s acting like a four-year-old with regards to Santa's impending arrival, putting out the cookies and the carrots for the reindeer, going to bed so Santa can come.

Obviously there is a cognitive difference in such an individual.

 

[rousseau]

It depends. Do you want to grant the person of religious faith their own free-will and sense of self? Then sure, in this light their faith is a kind of.. thing that happens, a part of human nature. In the same vein the person rationalizing their faith has their own, disparate goals.

From my personal perspective I've let go of the idea of what people should be like, or who we should be. The atheist, or rationalist tends to dream of a world where everything works by reason or logic, but to me this is just as dogmatic of a view as religious belief. That's not to say we shouldn't strive to be reasonable, but I also think it's an unreasonable expectation for a species that is made out of matter, and who shares ancestry with monkeys to transcend the more superstitious and unreasonable parts of it's own psyche.

Why not just let people be who they are, and do what they do, and enjoy them from that perspective, rather than spending our lives obsessing over how what we do is innately wrong?

That's not a bad way to think about things, it can bring a lot of personal peace, but I wonder if it accomplishes anything beyond that. Maybe faith is part of this approach in that it lets live but hopes for the best. In other words if a person likes knowledge they can only go so far if they continue to live in a cave. They may come up with different ideas about what the moon is and what those points of light are in the night sky but they won't ever understand cultures on the other side of the globe or read Shakespeare.

The truly great loss, however, is about potential, the things that could have been but were never even thought about. A person of faith as I've described it would seem to be afraid of things new, more inclined to say those are the works of evil spirits, not things good. We hear persons say that god didn't want us to know this or that.

I feel like we reach this point eventually in most of our conversations about religion, which boils down to personal motive.

If a person believes in religion, things religious, and has faith in God of their own free will, then it's not accomplishing something for them, it's accomplishing something for you, and for those like you. If you believe religious thought is some kind of evil that needs to be destroyed, fair enough, although personally I prefer to not spend my life trying to reason with brick walls, when lack of critical thinking skills runs a lot deeper than religious ideas.

The older I get the more aware I am that the overwhelming majority of people have minimal to no critical thinking skills, don't form their own ideas or opinions, and mostly just do what everyone around them is doing. You might be able to prune a few religious ideas, but the fundamentally irrational nature of our species isn't going away. We've evolved to try to get laid, to have kids, to fit in with those around us, not to be rationalists. Given that, I'm not convinced that, given the psychological pay-back of religiously based ideas, that this type of thinking is ever going away completely.

I'm just going to sit back and enjoy this world I live in through my peep-hole while I still can, without the grandiose notion that I can affect it meaningfully.

 

[ideologyhunter]

although personally I prefer to not spend my life trying to reason with brick walls, when lack of critical thinking skills runs a lot deeper than religious ideas.

Given that, I'm not convinced that, given the psychological pay-back of religiously based ideas, that this type of thinking is ever going away completely.

I try to follow this way of reacting more and more, and for exactly the same reasons that I will not engage hard right conservatives in dialogue. We have no common footing -- not even a shared definition of reality, with the Trumpist venom of "fake news" in the air -- so nothing good will result.
George F. Will calls himself an unaggressive atheist, which is another way of saying it.
Two branches of my family have some dogmatic Christians; they may even be inerrantists, but I don't really know, since I go silent when they start the faith talk, and I don't encourage their narrative. I find their fervent faith to be silly, feckless, a complete dead end, but there's no way I'll ever go into this with them. Why bother? Also, why disrupt communication in a family over a fantasy life that they indulge in, and I don't? It does bring a certain dishonesty into our relationship, because withholding that much disagreement is a misrepresentation of me. But the alternative is worse.
(I'll admit to being happily amused when one of my cousins, a fairly cynical guy, told his born-again sister to stop trying to proselytize his kids. Bravo!)

 

[southernhybrid]

(I'll admit to being happily amused when one of my cousins, a fairly cynical guy, told his born-again sister to stop trying to proselytize his kids. Bravo!)

My son's father, aka his genetic unit, is an extremely brainwashed Baha'i, a religion that I once respected before I realized that my ex loved his beliefs more than he loved anyone or anything else. When our grandkids were very young, he started sending our son Baha'i literature and stories. My son had to tell him to stop.

Luckily, his step day, aka my husband, is an atheist. We never told our son what to believe, but he figured it out on his own. He's doesn't care about religion. He just thinks it's kind of nutty. His wife isn't religious but she has or used to have some weird woo beliefs, but they were harmless.

I'm way beyond the point where I care what other people believe as long as they don't try to force it on others, or use it a an excuse to judge the character of other people.

 

[remez]

Having religious faith requires some combination of ignorance and self-deceit. Either I don't have the information that I require to make an informed decision and so I just go with the teaching, or I do in fact possess a significant degree knowledge to bring to bear but am afraid to face the resulting conclusion, and so I opt to live a lie, namely that I prefer ignorance to truth. In either case I am living an untruth, however comforting.

So it seems to me that religious faith is largely a myth, hence we hear discussions about "Faith and Reason" owing to the fact that they present opposing methodologies to dealing with a claim. There really isn't any faith, rather ignorance or willful self-deceit that results in an acceptance of a belief.

A child who believes in Santa literally has faith in Santa.

But what if I do have the information to make an informed decision that God exists?

Notice, you are only asserting there is no evidence or good reasoning for God’s existence. I’m sure such reasoning has been presented to you. We have battled over it in the past, Joedad. And you have rejected my evidence with less plausibility than I have to hold it. But you ignore that and deceive yourself to you feel informed enough to assert that theism has no evidence and reasoning. That is the picture of ignorance and self-deceit.

Well, I reject your unsupported premise that I don’t have good reason to believe God exists. Thus it is your burden to show me where my reasoning and evidence is weaker than your reasoning and evidence against it. You don’t just get to counter. You have to make the case that your counter, that your reasoning against is better than my reasoning of support. This is where your assertion above breaks down. Like abaddon, you simply reason that any presented counter eliminates my reasoning. It doesn’t and is a self-delusion. You would need to show your counter is more reasonable than by premise.

For example, based upon the available evidence, I reason that the universe (the space time continuum to include all time, space and matter, not Uncle Karl’s pantheistic everything there is, or was or ever shall be.) began to exist. Evidenced by the 2nd law of thermodynamics, expanding universe, cosmic radiation background, the galaxy seeds, relativity, the BGV theorem, etc. So how is that an “uninformed decision?” Seriously it requires more blind faith (belief w/o or against the evidence) to reason that a past eternal universe is remotely plausible. Thus the theistic implications (decisions) of a past finite universe are not “uninformed.” Good luck arguing against the reasoning for a beginning universe.

Also before you start shouting the virtues of “I don’t know” agnosticism. Aka IDKism. You have to stay consistent. If you can’t know something with absolute certainty then you cannot concurrently hold your “decision” as rational. For example…..your assumption….”Having religious faith requires some combination of ignorance and self-deceit.”

 

[abaddon]

But what if I do have the information to make an informed decision that God exists?

Then believe in God.

Like abaddon, you simply reason that any presented counter eliminates my reasoning.

Not "eliminates".

You asked me once what my belief-system is. I said Pyrrhonism. You responded in effect, "that's just for consolation, what do you REALLY believe?" No it is not merely for consolation, it's an anti-dogmatism epistemology. I do what I can to avoid believing anything unless it is evidently true (the way "the sky is blue" and "animals evolved" are evidently true). I don't need conjectural (or what you'd call "plausibly reasonable") answers to anything. Religious or scientific is not the issue for me. Abstracted away from the most evident of things = no good reason to believe. (Which is very different from saying "no reasons" or "no evidence").

You would need to show your counter is more reasonable than [my] premise.

All that is needed is to show your premise is weak and therefore it's reasonable to "withhold assent". That is, disbelieve. It's not an obliteration of your reasoning, but that there are good reasons to doubt your reasons.

For example, based upon the available evidence, I reason that...

Probably everyone knows your reasoning already. I for one have answered it adequately in the past, and others have too, and repeating already-answered arguments isn't interesting to me. Once a solid reason to not believe is found, then you have to present something NEW and not repeat the same-old same-old again.

 

[DBT]

The nature of the information behind an 'informed decision' may be problematic.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I'm just going to sit back and enjoy this world I live in through my peep-hole while I still can, without the grandiose notion that I can affect it meaningfully.

I take that to mean you have not given up the discussion but have in deed given up on any expectations. That's pretty safe.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

(I'll admit to being happily amused when one of my cousins, a fairly cynical guy, told his born-again sister to stop trying to proselytize his kids. Bravo!)

My son's father, aka his genetic unit, is an extremely brainwashed Baha'i, a religion that I once respected before I realized that my ex loved his beliefs more than he loved anyone or anything else. When our grandkids were very young, he started sending our son Baha'i literature and stories. My son had to tell him to stop.

Luckily, his step day, aka my husband, is an atheist. We never told our son what to believe, but he figured it out on his own. He's doesn't care about religion. He just thinks it's kind of nutty. His wife isn't religious but she has or used to have some weird woo beliefs, but they were harmless.

I'm way beyond the point where I care what other people believe as long as they don't try to force it on others, or use it a an excuse to judge the character of other people.

Religious dogma and practice used to be a path to success. It takes time for such selection pressure to go away. Woo in itself is not harmful but believing that woo is real can be problematic to say the least as the world secularizes. We're seeing the beginning of the opposite of the way the world worked in the dark and middle ages. Science is making that happen. But cognitive inequality is still a reality. That said, even people who cannot comprehend science and reason can be made to accept non-woo as a successful survival path, and that is happening today.