These religions are often much more different than their common manifestations, but their peddlers simplify and adulterate the teachings to make them more palatable. It involves serious work to become either a real Christian or a real Muslim, and people prefer "drive-through religion", as it were.
I suggest you explore religion, especially religion that exists outside of the spotlight, more deeply to gain an appropriate understanding of how these things work.
For instance, religion does not emphasize faith over reason, but faith in tandem with reason; faith on a basic level is merely sufficient trust to give something an earnest try (or, in more religious terms, "things hoped for but not seen", which is to say, a belief in potential), which is a principle necessary in the acquisition of all meaningful knowledge.
It's not a contradiction, you don't understand. Faith is the serious belief that something can happen or is real. When a scientist embarks upon a hypothesis, he does so because he has faith that something valuable may come from experimenting on that hypothesis, which is a hope for value not yet seen. Faith is not just a belief or hope, but it is a set of works accomplished in the attitude of that hope, so the scientist, by faith, continues his experiments on a hypothesis.
The same process occurs in the spiritual and religious realm with regard to faith. Religious people hear that certain information and/or manifestations are available to them, and they have faith sufficient to follow the path outlined. As they do so, they find their initial faith validated, and then they continue to have faith on the next point outlined in the scriptures, and find that faith validated, and so on.
Faith is not knowledge; faith is a stopgap on the way to knowledge, and it's a principle necessary for healthy or reasonable conduct in all forms, which is part of why religion requires such an emphasis of faith. If a man obtains all knowledge, there is no more need for faith, because he knows everything of himself and has no need to believe something without a formal proof, as he has already received a formal proof of every true thing, which can only happen as that man has sufficient faith in true things to experiment and learn of their truth with help from God. He has no faith because he no more has a mere hope in things not seen; he now sees all things.
Faith consists of believing something without reference to reality, i.e., divorced of reason.
A scientist engaging in an experiment is attempting to gain knowledge, and he may expect the experiment to go a certain way, based on what he knows.
Someone engaging in faith says, "I believe this, just because I want to." There is no reference to knowledge, reason, or reality. It's putting an "I wish" over "It is."
To engage in faith is to surrender your mind. To surrender your mind is the most basic kind of evil there is; it's anti-human life.
If you are actually interested in thinking about this further, you'll probably find my cousin response (i.e. responding to another child of this comment's grandparent) highly relevant.
Obviously, we disagree. Some may do that and call it faith, but people who are serious about faith do not believe without reference to reality or reason. Their faith is also predicated upon facts which they already know -- for instance, almost all people have an internal feeling that there is a God to be found out there. As such, based on their previous spiritual experiences, they will hear some information, believe that it is plausible and aligns with the things they already know, and act upon it, until their faith becomes knowledge on the topic, either affirming the original faith or negating it (learning something is true or learning something is not true).
In religious circles, one that believes things merely because they "want to" is not considered faithful, but ignorant at best. God has given reason to man and He expects man to use it. You may feel personally that a belief in any spiritual realm or being is unreasonable, but almost all people, historically, and to a somewhat lesser extent, contemporarily, disagree with you.
You're demonizing faith as an entire principle because some bad dudes have couched their badness in religion. It is common to attempt to shroud filthiness in virtue; most people find spiritual matters somewhat confusing but also consider spiritual teachers most noble, and that makes religion and false piety an excellent cover for corruption.
However, not every religious person is bad just because some "religious" teachers exploit and denigrate and abuse the trust of their perishoners ("false priests", as they are called).
Your attack on "faith" as a concept is silly; faith is often used in reference to religious circles because there seems to be some contention among modern persons whether it is worth having any faith in spiritual information at all, and they therefore assume their faith in scientists or physical teachers is not faith, but "reason", or something like that. Faith is a belief in a thing that has not been proven and a set of actions that seek to discover the reality of that belief one way or another. Anything that is eventually proven is proven because of the faith of its provers -- someone has to believe that an idea may have some merit in order to test it and discover if it is real or not.
Religious faith is necessary among all men because spiritual proofs are communicated "spirit to spirit", and as yet, man does not know how to transfer these or write a mathematical proof of spiritual truths learned personally. This, however, does not mean that faith is not necessary in non-religious fields. A small degree of faith is necessary to believe even things that have obvious and blatant proofs available.
The "anti-faith" thing is a silly and petty demonization and misappropriation, promoted by those that hate religion, and I don't really see the point in it, other than an attempt to make those that believe in religion and exercise faith in not just temporal, but also spiritual, matters appear "unreasonable" or stupid. And that's just not the case.
This has turned into an argument over the definitions of words, at its core. One person is defining "faith" to mean "having a belief that significantly mismatches the evidence", and you're defining "faith" to mean something drastically different. May I suggest either agreeing on a definition for the sake of argument, or splitting it into two separate words? You could call the first definition "mimble", and the second definition "spuzz", for example, and then the discussion might be able to go somewhere.
(I also don't consider your definition of faith to be particularly useful, and I suspect that you're equivocating, but those are tangential to my point here.)
I'm not trying to equivocate at all. I'm just trying to show that 'evidence' works fine in the large -- at the society level. But it doesn't work at the individual level since most individuals don't actually have evidence -- they choose to believe what their culture calls 'evidence'. Call it faith, belief, whatever. But the individual doesn't have evidence.
It's easier to see when we pick something that the whole culture hasn't coalesced on yet. Like string theory and worm holes. Some people believe there's a worm hole at the center of our universe. They have 'evidence' that supports their theory. I can believe or not, but I'll never know one way or another. 100 years from now, if everyone believes the _exact_ same theories we have today, with the _exact_ same raw data, my great-grandkids will say they know the worm hole exists and the 'evidence' is obvious. The only difference between now and then is how widely those theories are dispersed and accepted. Yet today I (and you?) wouldn't say we know worm holes exist. And my great-grandkids won't 'know' any more than you and I do.
In other words, my 'evidence' is what is commonly known and accepted to be true. Yet I personally don't know it to be true -- I trust that it is. Isn't that blind?
I agree with cookiecaper. I've never seen mars. I believe (blindly) that the books, pictures and lectures I've seen are real, and that other people's pronouncements (from NASA, etc) are real too, so I believe (ie have blind faith) that mars is real. I _assume_ (ie have faith) that I could do some research and become a little more sure.
Heck, that goes for atoms, electricity, just about everything. All I KNOW (without getting existential, etc) are things I've personally experienced. Everything else is pure belief (and blindly at that) based on trusting the sources.
You don't "blindly believe" the scientific facts/phenomena to which you refer. First, you have ample evidence to suggest that they exist. Second, they do not contradict anything else in reality that you are aware of. Third, you have reason to trust the process of cognition that led to those conclusions, i.e, the thought process and work of scientists that reference reality in their work and seek to prove things objectively.
Faith---which in common use (properly so) is equivalent to "religious faith" unless otherwise specified---breaks all of those rules.
I, personally, have no _evidence_ that the big bang really happened. I have heard people tell me it's so. I've read books claiming it's so. I have to have faith in these books and these people. That's the essence of my argument -- very, very few of us have actual evidence. What we have is the words of others. In other words, there are only a small handful of people that have built a device that can measure background microwave radiation and devices to measure red-shift, etc. Those few people know what they have observed and can interpret that information. Everything else that is built on those observations (many more theories, etc) is based on a belief in those original few peoples' work. And we, the masses, then have to believe those secondary interpretations. Heck, I haven't even gotten the information from the data interpreters, but rather from other writers who have interpretted it further and written text books, blog posts, etc. So yeah, it's pretty close to blind faith since I'm so many steps away from the truth, and don't have the ability (currently, with my existing education) to truely know it anyway even if I could speak directly to one of those scientists that built the space probe. I'd STILL have to trust him when he showed me the raw data.
Belief should not be absolute, but a matter of degree. If I flip a coin ten times, I believe that it'll land heads at least once. How strongly do I believe it? As a matter of fact, I'm a little more than 99.9% sure. The probability of getting at least one head is 1023/1024.
On more complex things, it's harder (and sometimes uncomputable) to come up with such precise probability estimates, but that doesn't change the principle. I believe with greater than 99% certainty that evolution happened. I believe with less certainty that Moore's law will continue for another two or three process nodes. I have very little belief that "psychics" can talk with the dead; equivalently, I have a very high degree of belief that they can not talk with the dead.
The degrees of belief we have about things should be revised upward or downward based on evidence, and should be based on the evidence we have available to us. Your belief that mars is real is supported by a lot of evidence, and therefore should have a high degree of confidence. But if I told you that there's a planet, unknown until now, called Uldune, and that this planet has space pirates using it as a supply base, then believing me with non-negligible certainty would be an act of blind faith. (Disbelieving me, with high certainty, would not be. My story about the planet Uldune contradicts a lot of evidence about the current state of the art in space travel, and the laws of physics, and so on.)
Evolution is a good example. Why do you believe it happened? Because someone told you. You read someone else's words. It sort of makes sense. You saw what you assume are dinosaur bones in a museum. All of that is faith, and perhaps blind faith.
I'm assuming you're not a geneticist, so you probably didn't verify that the bones that were stacked nicely into a skeleton actually came from the same being. You likely weren't part of the dig team that found them. You don't know where they came from, or even if they are actual bone. And I'm not even talking about people purposely misleading us, but rather the fact that we have to take at face value what we are told. That's blind faith. We both _assume_ we could dig and verify the facts (with enough time, money and education), but we don't -- we just believe.
My argument is the 'evidence' we think we have, is nothing more than blind faith in 99% of the time, simply because we don't have the time and resources to follow up on everything. We simply believe because everyone else does.
If your definition of "blind faith" is broad enough that accepting things on "blind faith" is actually a good, fairly reliable predictor of possible future observations, then I think you should get a narrower definition.
For example, I accept on "blind faith" the fact that Australia exists. But if I got on a plane to Australia, I have every reason to expect that it will go to a real place called Australia, rather than secretly taking me to Botswana or something. By your definition, a belief in Australia and a belief in unicorns are both lumped under the category of blind faith, which I think is a really silly classification.
All our observations of the world -- even sight, sound, smell, and so on -- are indirect. Your eyes don't see all wavelengths, and they can be tricked into confusing combinations of red, green, and blue as "the same color" as a pure wavelength of light. And don't get me started on the preprocessing that happens before the signals even reach your brain! Will you categorize everything you see as being taken on blind faith as well? Where do you draw the line?
"a belief in Australia and a belief in unicorns are both lumped under the category of blind faith, which I think is a really silly classification."
I'm not lumping them together. Lots of people that I trust tell me they've been to Australia. I don't have any reason to doubt them. I trust them, so accept that Australia is there. Lots of others also publish pictures, movies, etc so I trust them too. But that's a belief, not a knowledge -- I _personally_ have no evidence at this point.
Nobody I know professes to have seen a unicorn. I also have no personal evidence, so I don't believe that.
And like I said above, I'm not trying to go to the point of whether we can trust our senses, or know whether or not we actually exist or any of that. I'm just trying to show that individually, each of us live our lives with 99% belief (ie no personal experience/evidence), and 1% knowledge (things we've personally experienced).
Let's take the atom. How do YOU KNOW that atoms exist? What personal experience/evidence do YOU have that they exist? We both believe they exist, but neither of us have split one and know for a fact that there is a nucleus in there. We both choose to believe, based on the coherent story we hear from many other sources.
... says the "astronomy priest" to me :) I have to take your word for it. I know there is what appears to be a star that looks brighter than most others. I, personally, don't have a means at my disposal to know it's mars. I just have to believe you.
This is not faith. We agree on the name we give to that spot in the sky, which happen to be "Mars". Then we agree to name "planets" the spots that behave in a given manner, "stars" the other spots, etc. That's just how languages are built. "Believing" that the language work "well enough" is necessary for normal life and intellectual exchanges.
To dig deeper, the faith leap is more done when we agree that every night, the spot of light we see at roughly the same place in the sky is the emanation of a unique object, that deserves a unique name. This is related to the identity problem.
It is faith for _me_ since I've never looked through a telescope and seen that it is indeed a nearer-mass/rock, and not a star as it appears in the sky. Unless you have seen it with your own eyes, you too are believing based on the words of others. My point isn't that we can't verify some of the things we think are true, but my point is that we usually don't. Instead, we believe what we're taught because everyeone else around us believes.
We're not so different from the people at the time of Columbus that were taught the world was flat. They didn't (most couldn't verify it), but everyone 'knew' it was true. That had been taught it, they had books describing it, and maps showing it. They had as much evidence as I do about mars.
Many people really have seen mars through telescopes, and a number of rocket scientists have built devices to go and look at it indirectly. THOSE people KNOW mars exists. The rest of us believe, blindly, what we are told about it. I don't doubt mars exists in the least, only because I _choose_ to believe it exists.
Actually, people in the time of Columbus knew the the Earth was round. That's been in European cultural knowledge for about two thousand years. It was Columbus who was mistaken. He thought the earth was much smaller than everyone else did. That he could sail west to Asia in a few weeks. He was completely wrong. A fool who was funded by a fool.
But you're right, in that they had as much evidence as you have about Mars. As in, with a some hours of observation, you too could establish that the Earth is round and that Mars is a planet and know as much as a 15th century nobleman. All from first principles. You just need to view the evidence.
That's different than religion and "faith". Those don't require evidence. In fact, faith require the absence of evidence.
You can try to equate evidence-based beliefs and non evidence-based beliefs, but they are not the same.
I don't think you're following my line of reason. You and I believe that red point is a planet because someone else taught us that. We don't have any independent evidence -- we simply believe what others have told us. I'm not arguing about the definition of a planet, or what 'Mars' is -- I'm arguing about what you and I _KNOW_. We don't KNOW that red point is planet -- we've simply been taught, and believe it. For the record, I believe Mars is a planet, despite having no personal experience or evidence whatsoever.
I suggest you explore religion, especially religion that exists outside of the spotlight, more deeply to gain an appropriate understanding of how these things work.
For instance, religion does not emphasize faith over reason, but faith in tandem with reason; faith on a basic level is merely sufficient trust to give something an earnest try (or, in more religious terms, "things hoped for but not seen", which is to say, a belief in potential), which is a principle necessary in the acquisition of all meaningful knowledge.