One of the great accomplishments of the New Atheists has been to tear down the idea that faith is a good thing. Pay attention to anyone involved in religious debates that has become familiar with what atheists have been saying. They do all they can to distance themselves from faith – something the Bible pushes as a good thing. (It’s almost like people cherry-pick what they want to take from their holy books, huh?) This is largely due to the New Atheist emphasis on the need for evidence.
Of course, go to any church with an average congregation that is unfamiliar with these sort of debates and it will not be difficult to find people who still highly value faith. That’s sort of religion’s thing.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: faith, Thought of the day |
For the Sake of Science 
The funny thing is that faith is ALL they have. Biblical scholars have shown that the OT and NT are a collection of fantasies and forgeries. The Koran is a somewhat crude, illiterate collection of sick hatred and the Mormons are just laughable.
Religion belongs in the bronze age where it came out of superstitious, uneducated people who needed a sky daddy.
Check out the discussions over at Jerry Coyne’s WEIT on the so-called sofisticated theologists.
Of course I have never seen any evidence that faith is inherently bad any more than it is inherently good.
Faith is belief without evidence. I don’t feel there needs to be further explanation as to why that is a bad thing.
Wouldn’t that really depend on what the person is putting faith in?
It does, but faith in religion is unlike faith in the Cubs.
Not really, not in any substantive way. You are assuming that having faith in the cubs produces no ill effects but faith in some religion or another does. I doubt either is an absolute truth.
I’m saying that faith in religion goes to fundamental beliefs about how to conduct one’s life whereas faith in a sports team does not.
Belief without evidence IS always a bad thing. It’s a fundamental rejection of the rules of reason, logic, and evidence… which are the only tools we have for survival. Rejecting reason is like refusing oxygen–always a bad decision and always harmful.
It’s funny that, copyleft, because humans irrational fears of the dark and deep water and so on have (most likely) played a huge part in our survival.
(we don’t see well and we don’t swim well, in case you didn’t get it)
Snakes and spiders can be deadly, many people have irrational fears of those things as well.
Irrationality, in fact, is one of the greatest contributors to our survival.
…until education, reason, logic and critical thinking superseded it by orders of magnitude. Otherwise humans are equivalent to fearful mice.
Eh, to an extent.