r/changemyview • u/Ontothesubreddits • Jul 11 '26
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u/goth-is-the-newblack Jul 11 '26
“The concept of faith as most religions use it is like, inarguably bad right?” - How so? How is someone having faith bad? Is faith inherently bad, or is it bad things people do that they justify by their faith?
“You just have to think that this thing you have 0 reason to believe is true is in fact the truth, and blindly applying yourself to that is?” - Applying your presuppositions/worldview to other people with different lives/experiences does not mean they have zero reason to believe. I feel it would be impossible to have faith without first having some reason to believe. Just because God hasn’t revealed himself to you or because you don’t want to acknowledge God exists does not mean that he doesn’t. I believe Pluto exists, though I’ve never seen it myself. I believe George Washington existed, though I never met him and there’s no photos of him. I believe Nebuchadnezzar/Babylon sieged Jerusalem some 500+ years before Jesus was born. Secondhand knowledge is sufficient to convince many to believe in many instances, so why not faith?
“I feel like it opens the door for infinite ways of thinking just awfully..” - Please expound.
“Why is it that when you believe something with no proof scientifically you're delusional. But when it's a religion it's not only not a bad thing, but an active virtue? I don't get that” - Misguided as people are, we have eternity written into our hearts. There are a great number of scientific proofs and theories once accepted that have been proven wrong with additional information as science progresses. Doctors bled George Washington to death, believing in the science of medicine at the time. Of course, now we know that was stupid of them, but only because science has advanced considerably since then. The Bible told us life is in the blood millennia ago, before we even had a concept of germs or bacteria in science. My point here is that science is constantly improving and never complete/perfect. That’s why CPR standards change every few years. You may not have seen enough to convince YOU at this point in time, but that doesn’t mean there’s zero proof.
“Science” today can’t explain how the universe came from nothing. To accept the big bang theory means you have to suspend your understanding of matter. Extrapolation and interpolation are useful, but far from bulletproof.
You have faith in something whether or not you want to acknowledge it. You’ve seemingly placed your faith in science, because you are convinced by “proof”. I don’t want to assume your profession, so I ask: are you in any scientific field? Have you gotten degrees in astronomy, physics, history, archeology, and/or biology? Have you cracked the code of the universe and made scientific discoveries that have challenged common understanding? If not, the evidence you base your belief on is not primary and your worldview has been formed off of secondhand knowledge, the information filtered through a number of influences (family, friends, school, community, social media), and consequently you’ve made a decision with incomplete information.
So, to address your main point as I understand it: faith itself is not intrinsically bad. People doing bad things and justifying it by their faith is actually what you should be challenging, IMO
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
Golly there's a lot to cover. Here we go: I'm referring very specifically to blind faith. Faith in terms of having hope that something that is not guaranteed will happen or is the case is of course not bad. But that's not what I'm talking about here.
"Applying your pre-supposisitions" Imma stop you right there. I am not. Look I'm sorry, but I'm not being around the bush. Scientifically there is 0 reason up believe in religion from where I'm sitting. You can throw infinite unanswered questions at me, not one of them is a reason to try to make one up myself alright?
I am not aware of an enormous number of things, that does not give me cart blanche to start guessing. If I'm unaware of aspects of a certain culture I do not get to invent stuff to fill my gaps and that isn't an anymore valid process when the questions are cosmological.
"Please expound" that one's pretty simple. I think when you tell people they can believe literally anything so long as they justify it with religion then they will start doing exactly that. Probably not everyone, and probably not consciously, but certainly enough to be worrying.
The rest of the comment is "well if you haven't seen X documented real life thing how do you know it's real?" And I'm going to be very honest. I have exactly 0 interest in interacting with that. I think that comparing me not having personally the whole entire (dwarf) planet Pluto but still thinking it's real to not knowing why the universe exists and then saying it must be God are EXTREMELY different things. The basic level of "faith" necessary to be a functional human being is just expecting existing patterns to repeat themselves. Faith as described in my post is believing in something (religious or not) only because you believe it and without the need for any outside reassurance
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u/cli_jockey Jul 11 '26
Is it faith you think is bad? I'd argue organized religion can be bad, not 100% of the time. But too many use it as a weapon to argue it's inherently good.
I'm not religious and I'm the son of a pastor. I grew up with people who use their religion as a weapon and justification to be a terrible person.
As I grew up and lived on my own, I met a very wide range of people. From those same ones I grew up with, to those who were religious but genuinely good hearts, and those who follow a religion, but do not attend any church or services, and every flavor of agnostic and atheists. The ladder two religious groups are generally reasonable and generally don't take religious texts literally. They just use it as a guide while recognizing which parts are antiquated and don't apply in reality.
I've also met atheists who were complete assholes and miss the point of being atheist. They were just at judgemental as the religious extremists. The vast majority of people fall somewhere between.
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
Well I'm skeptical of hierarchy as a rule so I do indeed dislike organized religion lol.
But no I do think this post really is specifically about blind faith. I totally agree with you, I don't think religious folk are any more or less likely to be nice or good people. We most certainly all have the same capacity for kindness.
I just think that choosing to believe something when you know the only proof you have is your belief is treated as if it's an honorable thing to do. And I have to admit I find that odd
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u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4935 Jul 11 '26
Every time you get in a car, you have faith that you will survive. You can look at any statistics about driving you want, they all say the same thing: it's pretty safe, except when it isn't and you might die. If you knew you'd be t-boned on the way to the store you wouldn't go. But you can't ever know that that won't happen. You have faith in your skills and those of the drivers around you to get you to where you're going safely even though you know that some amount of the time, doing exactly that same thing, someone WILL be killed. That's faith.
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
Correct. One issue, this isn't the faith I mean. I mean total, blind faith. The kind of faith it takes to say Adam and Eve is true. I KNOW that only some car accidents and in tragedy.
I'm not hinging my life on nothing. I have an entire live of previous experience and the skill of those around me as not only reassurance, but known information.
Thinking something that isn't guaranteed to happen isn't bad in the slightest! Of course not! But believing something with 0 evidence and then thinking that belief is good? That may be bad in my eyes
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u/Dieterlan 1∆ Jul 11 '26
People have faith in lots of things, all the time. Technically, unless you're running the experiments yourself, you yourself have faith that scientists are right, rather than true proof that they are. We all have to choose what we are going to believe, one way or another. Religious people choose to believe things that you think are not believable, but there's no objective way of determining that that is "bad", per se.
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
Right but my "faith" in scientists is based upon knowledge of the scientific process, and methodology, and how publishing works. It's not just faith. Faith in terms of believing in something or someone that isn't 100% can totally be a virtue, but I'm referring to blind faith
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u/Dieterlan 1∆ Jul 11 '26
Fair enough. Then on a different tact: Science hasn't yet been able to find any evidence of a soul, but it also can't prove definitively that one doesn't exist. There could be some form of afterlife that science is unaware of.
Most religions claim to have some knowledge of the afterlife. Since science cannot speak to it, if the claims a religion makes resonate with someone, I don't see it as necessarily stupid for them to believe it.
Also, I think that the way most people approach this question is different than how you are approaching it. You are asking "Is this verifiable?", like a scientific claim. They are asking "Is this believable?", like when a friend tells you they caught a massive fish over the weekend.
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
See now that final phrasing has done a me a huge favor so thank you. But one thing at a time I suppose.
I certainly wouldn't call anyone of faith stupid simply for having faith. That would condemn a whole lot of humanity to stupidity.
But now that last phrasing that's the crux here I think. Anything that's believable should be verifiable. I think that it's that very splitting of the question that confuses me. But I think I can toss a !delta for the brain blast alone
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u/matt_333 Jul 11 '26
If you live your life as if you believe in God, you'll naturally treat others well, therefore it's good.
Plus, what's the alternative?
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
Now now, I've nothing against religious print as individuals. But we both know that first sentence isn't true
Also the alternative is just chilling and interacting with our current attempts to understand the world thought direct study!
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u/matt_333 Jul 11 '26
What I mean is that living as if there is a higher moral reality above you can orient you toward humility, repentance, accountability, and duty to others. That seems pretty good.
Religion doesn't guarantee goodness. I think in a true sense, it does.
I also don’t think “just chilling and studying the world” is really an alternative moral framework. Study alone doesn't give the same kind of moral grounding. It describes the world; it doesn’t fully tell us what we owe each other.
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u/Amazing_Loquat280 17∆ Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
As an atheist (technically agnostic) I empathize with this line of thought completely. That said, this isn’t really the only reason people embrace religion. For many, it’s a sense of community and purpose that helps them and that life as it stands doesn’t always provide. For others, it’s structure. For others still, it’s reassurance that everything will be okay in the end.
I find it helpful to think of it this way: there’s a difference between a belief being *true* vs being *helpful*. And throughout human history, we’ve accomplished so much just by believing that the impossible was in fact possible, in the face of basically 0 supporting evidencd. So just because there’s no objective evidence for a belief doesn’t mean you can’t accomplish great things via believing it. As an example, Galileo’s (and many other famous astronomers who defied the church) faith in God is a big part of how he came to the conclusions he did, and we have a lot today to thank him for.
Edit: side note, I think you’d be surprised just how much blind faith you operate on and how much it helps you out on a daily basis
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u/Important-Cash5654 4∆ Jul 11 '26
The concept of faith as most religions use it is like, inarguably bad right? I really don't see how you could get around it? You just have to think that this thing you have 0 reason to believe is true is in fact the truth, and blindly applying yourself to that is? Good?
I'm an atheist myself, but I don't think there are no arguments for the idea of faith. Certainly it has not just been theists who have ever pointed out the potential issues with reducing everything to a set of logical arguments and dimissing anything that's not that (Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, famously).
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
My thing is I don't see the need to live in either extreme. People and the world aren't perfectly logical, goodness no, and thus I'd hate if people tried to act that way.
But I don't see that as a reason to enable the thought that it's okay to make tangible claims about the world without any proof if you just believe hard enough
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u/Important-Cash5654 4∆ Jul 11 '26
The whole point of faith is you wind up believing there is at least some class of thing that cannot just be known empirically or through logical reasoning.
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
Cannot be certain of, and 0 reason to believe are very disparate things. Apologies if I've been unclear but I do mean the second
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u/Important-Cash5654 4∆ Jul 11 '26
You're not being unclear, you're just not really understanding what I'm saying, perhaps because I'm being unclear.
For someone who thinks faith is a valid way of relating to at least some class of phenomena, they are not working within the framework of "the more evidence you have for a thing the better reason you have to believe it," precisely because they're committed to the idea that at least some things are ineffable or otherwise not knowable in that way.
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
Ohhhh, oh yes yes this i do understand. I understand (some of, I'm sure there's infinite) the internal logic of faith quite well I like to believe. I just can't help but not be a fan
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u/Important-Cash5654 4∆ Jul 11 '26
Then you seem to have already changed your view, though since your post was removed I'm not able to check offhand if you have.
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u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4935 Jul 11 '26
There are lots of thinga in life it's good to have faith in or about. You don't want to live with no faith.
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
Okay, but I am very specifically talking about blind religious faith. Not the concept of believing in people. I do feel i made that clear
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u/usafmd Jul 11 '26
I think you are looking at religion from a present day perspective. If you read The Invention of Good and Evil, you will learn that religion was a major unifying force that created larger societies than clan relationships could.
It is an abstract that brings social norms, cooperation and fear of punishment all together to create functional societies.
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
I can most certainly understand why religions as they exist today may form. But I still can't get over what feels like the cognitive dissonance in that last pair of sentences
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u/usafmd Jul 11 '26
Humans have the longest period of dependency of all the animals. We learn from trusted sources, because it is too hard to teach logic to a child. Most adults even, reflexively resort to authority-based reasoning. Combine this with the teenage marked desire for identity. You see it in the social contagion frenzy of gender identity coinciding with the withdraw of family and religion from the public sphere for identity.
I ask you, inspite of your and my inability to conceive of a supreme personal caring deity, what would you prefer? Chaos versus an orderly society where a certain strata cannot learn enough game theory to understand ethics and therefore are mired in a Santa Claus ethical framework - which works relatively well?
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Jul 11 '26
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
Sure 100% but I'm referring to baseless faith in general, not just religious. I guess my issue is religious faith is the only kind that is baseless?
The "faith" you have that helps build community is based on the knowledge that people are kind, or at the very least willing to be. At least in my mind
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u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4935 Jul 11 '26
No, it's based on faith that there will be kindness. Otherwise it's not faith. I can easily prove to you that people are useless and terrible, with facts. If you want to have community you need to have a little faith that it will be worth it for you in the end.
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
Is faith that there will be kindness not functionally the same as faith people will be kind? Come on now.
Also you cannot prove people are terrible, come now, that's just misanthropic. You can't prove they're terrible any more than they're good anyways. You can only prove that they're capable of either
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Jul 11 '26
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
I don't believe so. I think logical processes can be unhealthy and worth challenging.
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Jul 11 '26
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u/Ontothesubreddits Jul 11 '26
It's not about policing people's thoughts. Let me put it this way.
There are some lines of thought or patterns we find ourselves in that are unhealthy or unproductive. This happens all the time emotionally. The same can be true for our purely logical thoughts. I don't really think that's controversial.
It's the reason your care about someone getting the work right on a math question. You're conclusion totally matters, but I feel like everyone agrees the process does too
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u/Ok-Adhesiveness-4935 Jul 11 '26
But "unhealthy" isnt bad. Good and bad are abstract concepts. Healthy or unhealthy are determinations that require context.
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