On Faith

[Unbeliever]

QuoteDB::Faith

How do you choose between believing in Jesus, Bigfoot, leprechauns, witchcraft, Islam, alien abductions, the Tooth Fairy, gold at the end of the rainbow or the myriad other assertions that people have made over the course of human history? Try using your brain to evaluate some evidence. Yes, it requires more work than blind faith, but the results are less like rolling the dice and hoping you have placed your faith in a true proposition.
However, if you are still inclined to place faith in an un-provable assertion, I am God, send me money.

Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty... certainty is murderous.

No wonder that there is no true and intelligible account of faith in Christian literature. What they mean is too shocking to survive exposure. Faith is a great vice, an example of obstinately refusing to listen to reason, something irrational and undesirable, a form of self hypnotism. Newman wrote that 'if we but obey God strictly, in time (through His blessing) faith will become like sight' (Sermon XV). This is no better than if he had said: 'Keep on telling yourself that there is a god until you believe it. Hypnotize yourself into this belief.'

How do you choose between believing in Jesus, Bigfoot, leprechauns, witchcraft, Islam, alien abductions, the Tooth Fairy, gold at the end of the rainbow or the myriad other assertions that people have made over the course of human history? Try using your brain to evaluate some evidence. Yes, it requires more work than blind faith, but the results are less like rolling the dice and hoping you have placed your faith in a true proposition. However, if you are still inclined to place faith in an un-provable assertion, I am God, send me money.

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.

It is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

People kill and are killed because they cling too tightly to their own beliefs and ideologies. When we believe that ours is the only faith that contains the truth, violence and suffering will surely be the result.

Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying.

Faith means the will to avoid knowing what is true.

A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and die for it without the need for further justification.

The priests used to say that faith can move moutains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.

Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.

I am arguing that faith as such, faith as an alledged method of acquiring knowledge, is totally invalid and as a consequence, all propositions of faith, because they lack rational demonstration, must conflict with reason.

Christian faith is a habit of flouting reason in forming and maintaining one's answer to the question whether there is a god. Its essence is the determination to believe that there is a god no matter what the evidence may be.

Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.

To rest one's case on faith is to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies--that one has no rational arguments to offer.

Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact anithesis and enemy of thought.

...if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking...the alledged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-cut destroying the mind.

.... all shine and no substance. You say you're giving people hope? I think you're stealing their hope. As long as the pre-requisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry, and hate.....I say to Hell with it!!