this may offend but...?

Question

Is 'faith' an excuse not to grow mentally and spiritually?

If you stop asking questions and just accept 'truth' in what might be a 'lie', if you have faith in something without any 'evidence' you choose to stand still in time, but honestly it is impossible not to move forward or backwards. As it is obvious in religious evolution. Religion has evolved just like everything else. Faith is just a method of slowing it down.

Why have faith in anything?

johnocrea...: You are right in way, i have 'faith' that 'truth' is non-existent, but, I ask questions to others and myself to find if i might be wrong. Maybe there is some greater 'truth' out there, maybe not.

Answer 1

Blind Faith doesn't just slow it down, it kills it. I think one can have faith in something, that it is true, but still be open to other options. Once you finally take one thing and put all your faith into it and nothing else, then you no longer grow. Especially if you refuse to even look at anything else. Some people won't even a read a book if they think it contradicts what they believe. That is Blind Faith.

Answer 2

Well, for the record, being positive is good for you. Optimists live better, happier, longer lives. That limits good faith into thinking that, outside of reason, that things are going to work out in the long run, or just being generally positive to the people around you. Having faith that your gay neighbor or the pregnant teen down the street are going to hell for their sins is beyond negative, its downright sadistic to take comfort in imagining the eternal torture of another human being for something so trivial as what life's thrown at them. As if being a sadistic hypocrite wasn't bad enough, sadists life even shorter lives than pessimists, much shorter.

As far as having "truth" and "faith" and "evidence"in the same outlook; the truth is what you know to be right, you get that from life experience, not from any book, even the Bible. Jesus didn't write the Bible, the Bible is not a primary source of Jesus Christ's first hand accounts, he had followers and they wrote it, but not Jesus.

Faith could be a lot of things for a lot of people. The faith you seem to be talking about is one where people cling to teachings in opposition to what life experience (the evidence) is telling them, thus preventing them from growing spiritually or mentally. You're definitely right, having that kind of faith has no point and its a bad way to go through your one stay on this planet. Why should you have faith, and what is a good kind of faith? See the first paragraph.

Answer 3

To not have faith is to not have hope. And without any hope where would we be. Just because you have faith doesn't mean that you should sit back and coast. We are called to grow mentaly and spiritually. Being saved or born again is not just a box that we check off and say "got that done". It is a never ending process as we are called to grow closer to Christ. As you pray, read the word of God, and fellowship you can't help but grow. My faith does not slow me down and I pray others don't use faith as an excuse to not grow.

To many put their faith in worldly things like posession or status. When you die those things are gone. But if you have faith in the Lord that faith will carry you into heaven for an eternity of glory.

Answer 4

No offence taken.

I feel that exercising faith actually has the opposite effect - it actually forces you to grow mentally and spiritually as you use it.

Having faith doesn't mean that you no longer question, it means that the questions you ask are just different to those asked by someone who doesn't have faith.

As for evidence, it exists but is subjective and personal, based on individual experience. We all (I hope) base our own world views on the sum of our experiences - which is as it should be.

Answer 5

This is the way I see it:

An analogy:
Reality is like a deep pit, with the "Real Truth" at the bottom. There are semi transparent platforms stretched across this pit at certain depths, and each one holds their own lesser truth. Some people land on the first platform and think that they have found the truth, they accept it and never question, never try to see through the platform. Others see through this surface, see that there is more to it than this, and they break through it to the next level. This process repeats, with some people staying behind on each platform, until just a handful of people reach the last one. But, is it the last one? Is it barely transparent, can you stare at it long enough to make out the faint outline on the next one? Do they ever end, or are we into a bottomless pit? That is the frightening thing about a quest for truth: we don't now. We just have to plow ahead blindly, hoping to find something real...

The people who have faith are the people who stopped, who are happy with what they found so far. If we are in a bottomless pit, then they did the right thing. If we aren't, then they will never know anyway, and continue to think that they did the right thing.

Answer 6

Faith may do these things to some extent, but faith also serves as a source of inner strength and hope for people who might otherwise slip into depression and not persevere in the face of great difficulty.

Also, I think it is disingenuous to assume that a faithful person need not be reasonable. A person can be faithful, and still be open to new ideas and tolerant of different ones. Deeply faithful people have an understanding of other deeply faithful people that the rest of us do not, even when their faiths are very different.

Answer 7

Faith is for those who need crutches - ie. those who can't cope with the realities of life. They're too frightened.
As for the ludicrous answer so frequently given about the evidence being all around and all you have to do is look - well, I see a flower. That is evidence (not proof) of the existence of a flower. Nothing else. Only the semi-literate would suggest that the flower is evidence (or proof) of other things besids itself. They of course are the subset of society that religion tries to gather to itself - a fighting force of fools!

Answer 8

It depends on what you have faith in. Are you really going to argue that people who have faith in the way of the Buddha, for example, aren't growing spiritually or mentally?

)O(

Answer 9

Faith is TRUST. I became a Christian 6 years ago for several reasons. However BLIND FAITH is not one of them.

You are right about not asking question is dumb. I asked question after question after question. It's a desire for the truth. This is why it is so important to be knowledgable of God's word. Through knowledge comes TRUST or FAITH. From there I learned how to Trust God and thus become spiritually mature in my relationship with Him.

Please don't think that Christians just believe these stories b/c they don't want to grow up. Yes, some of our Faith is Blind, but that's because we realize that there are many things about God that we don't understand or better yet "are not supposed to understand".

Regarding faith evolving...well I'm not sure what you mean by this. Christianity has spread into many many different denominations. Perhaps that's what you are implying. That may be so. But each denomination has a story behind it. For example Lutherans were started by Martin Luther to separated from the Catholic Church b/c it had become corrupt.

Most of these denominations are there to appeal to people. Many will join a church where they feel welcome. Some will feel more welcome in a Baptist Church instead of a Methodist Church, or Evangelical instead of Penacostal. The important thing is that the WORD of God (The BIBLE) remains unchanged as it has for thousands of years.

Overall, Faith is TRUST. And for millions and millions of people, regardless of religious affiliation, FAITH is what keeps them alive. It keeps them going. It becomes a ROCK for us to stand on when we feel that we have lost all hope.

It is FAITH that keeps the Hope of this world alive.

God Bless.

Answer 10

If you examine your own assumptions about the world in general, you will probably find that there are a great many things that you have accepted as true without having investigated them. The human mind is hard-wired to believe, to have a background set of assumptions about how the world works. Without that set of assumptions, we would be incapable of making choices or taking actions.

This set of assumptions exists as "faith," whether that faith be in a supreme being or the sciences or nature it remains faith.

In order to move forward, we must have a set of beliefs about how the world operates.

This may offend, but you have faith.