Define Faith

[Original Poster]

I could rez a thread from '06 but I'd rather just start fresh. The dictionary definition of Faith is believing in something without proof. This strikes me as wrong on an intuitive level. Because if you close yourself off to other points of view, experiences and possibilities, you aren't displaying any sort of faith at all. You're displaying fear. You are afraid of being wrong. Worse yet, you are afraid of being corrupted by something that's wrong but makes too much sense to deny, and thus excluding yourself from whatever posthumous reward you believe in. It appears to me that the core of this problem is fear of death. At least it was for me, back when I was a (very) young christian, I clung to religion out of fear of death. I remember the conversation in my head vividly. I realized how quickly time passed, I realized if I was already 6, and it felt like a fraction of an instant of time had passed since I used to dream about being 6, then soon I would be 7 and it would also feel like absolutely no time at all had passed when I hit that number. And so on it would go, until I'm 60 or 70 and my life is in its waning moments. And then I'd be gone. Before I even knew I was ever really here. This thought terrified me. I needed eternity, so I used God to find it. This is my personal story, I present it in case it relates to anyone else. But of course we all have our own specific stories. The point is, for me personally, I used God and Faith to secure my confidence in immortality. So to me, the root of faith as the dictionary defines it is fear of uncertainty. But this is not how I define faith. To me, faith means reveling in uncertainty. Faith is an attitude much like existentialism as described in the Myth of Sisyphus. As Alan Watts would say, if we could ever be truly certain of anything, the universe would immediately stop existing. The ever receding mystery enables the experience to persist. So I don't believe one can have faith in a concept. One cannot have faith in God, for instance, unless they are defining god as inconceivable. One cannot have faith that they follow the one true religion, unless they define their religion as love of the mystery and encompass all other religions within it. One can merely have faith. One can only realize, to paraphrase Marcus Aurelius, that the present demands their attention, and when the future comes they will have the necessary tools because they are focused on the present. To paraphrase Aristotle, a skeptic believes real truth is impossible to understand, but never stops searching for it. One can merely have faith that they carry the flame. This flame is not the flame of Christ, or of Buddha, or of Reason, but of all these things. Of Love, or Truth, or Space, or God or whatever you choose to call it. We think, therefore we are. We see, therefore we are. We see, therefore what we see is. So yeah, that's my rant of the week. Sorry if it's stupid. It was between this and paraphrasing the arguments proposed in The Story of B, which I may still do some time later.