Can someone give me points FOR the topic that faith is man's greatest enemy?

Answer 1

Faith, by definition, means to believe in something without having a reason or evidence to support it. Faith isn't _entirely_ bad, but I think on the whole it's more of a negative.

To some degree, being an optimist means having faith--not necessarily in a god or any higher power, but just in oneself and in one's fellow man. This can be a good thing because when you have faith in yourself, that is very empowering. Likewise when you have faith in others and generally in life, a bright outlook will generally get you farther than a pessimistic one, plus of course it simply makes life more enjoyable that way.

Where faith is a bad thing is when people use it in place of reason. Having faith that god will get you out of a jam or solve your problems, for example, means you're basically just shunning personal responsibility and putting your fate either in the hands of others, or leaving it to random chance. In this case faith is very DIS-empowering.

Similarly, when faith is used in place of science, this leads to the spread of ignorance and magical thinking. Creationism is a big example here--people adamantly have faith that they were created by their deity even when all the evidence clearly supports natural selection. People have faith that the universe was created by their deity when all the evidence points toward the inflationary big bang theory.

Having faith instead of rational thought can even be dangerous, as when some people with serious diseases like cancer would rather have faith in worthless stuff like homeopathy or faith healing instead of modern medicine.

But overall I think the worst part of faith is simply the way it erodes intellectual integrity. Faith teaches the mind that it doesn't need to rely on reason or evidence. Faith teaches the mind that it's OK to believe what you want to believe, creating a detachment from reality. Faith teaches that reality will conform to your beliefs, thus encouraging mental laziness since you don't need to bother with actually forming your beliefs based on the real world around you.

Because of faith, people have come to believe all sorts of baseless, crazy, and downright dangerous ideas. And when two peoples' beliefs come in conflict, if those beliefs are based on faith rather than reason, then those two people have already reached an impasse, and compromise or deciding on one belief based on reason & evidence becomes much more difficult, if not impossible. Thus faith encourages conflict between equally baseless belief systems, both political and religious.

The really sad part is, we just don't need this type of faith. The world is full of enough wonder and awe and greatness without having to believe in fairy tales or dogmas. It's a pity our schools don't teach this; the world would certainly be a much, much better place.

Answer 2

Is it some presumption about something you need to defend from an argument? I think you've got a lot of negative points. But I will enumerate you some of my opinion about its positive and negative sides.

The positive side:

1. It's true, faith is man's greatest enemy in terms of development. With faith, man can entirely depend on it, and assume all hardships for faith, neglecting his OWN capacity and therefore slowdown his growth. Because man depends too much of his faith, he forgets that he can also do things with hardwork.
2. Man can be blinded from more knowledge acquisition opportunities. He won't be able to learn how to discover for himself because he'd rather base occurrences from supernatural beliefs, and it is done through the presence of faith.

The negative side:

1. Faith is not really man's greatest enemy, because in one way or another, for a responsible man, it can help build his character in terms of application of good values.
2. Having faith doesn't really mean he HAS TO rely everything on it, because, upon studying the philosophy of religion, faith do not necessarily offer assurance of solving the different difficulties of man.
3. Our faith is psychological. If we have in our system our stable faith, we'll feel more secured giving us more self-confidence, and gradually give us a better opportunity to development.

Answer 3

You need some faith in life otherwise you'd have to hide under the covers all day long. Man's greatest enemy is himself.

Answer 4

Faith is not Man's greatest enemy.
Man's greatest enemy is Man itself.

Answer 5

If you were to put all your energy into having "faith" you'd fail as a human. You wouldn't do anything other than what was directly influenced by your faith. I think it's one of the greatest shame's of all when someone ruins a perfectly good brain by relying on an unseen power to do their work for them.

Answer 6

Faith in the ultimate is a must but fusion into an 'ism' makes a person biased. Take the truth and shun the isms