A Witty Title.

Its been a while since I posted, And i've currently been in a indepth discussion about faith on another friends blog. Ive writen a number of pages of musings on the subject, which I plan to repost below so you can all laugh at me. Err I mean read them and stuff.

So without further ado, heres a coupple of posts on faith.

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Let me start by saying I don't have any answers, But I'm gonna ramble a bit and see if anything useful comes out.

Hmm. I ranted about this a little in the comments of one of my recent posts.

In my mind faith is best described as a spiral. I'm going to speak about this in the context of the kind of faith I'm most comfortable in, that being religion, but faith can apply to anything.. faith that the chair your about to sit on isn't going to collapse under you for example.

To a large extent, faith can be taken as a synonym for trust. But faith is not necessarily blind faith. I can have faith in a chair, that it will be able to hold me up, it can be based on many things. It could be blind. I could just jump into it without examining it, or having tested it before. Or it could be based on reason. I look at the chair, I see how stable it is, I get an engineer friend to conduct a structural analysis of it and tell me the likelihood that it wont collapse under my weight. Nevertheless, no matter how much I look and examine, at some point I need to sit. I need to stop working with the theory and take a risk, trust that based upon what I've learnt from my examinations, this chair will hold me.

Alternately, I could trust the chair because of experience. I may have sat in it so many times before that I hardly think before sitting in it anymore, after all, its been trustworthy before, my faith has been proven by its action (Or in this case inaction, but you know what I mean) In this case we have faith in the chair, but its not so much reasoned.. If you asked me why I'm sure it wont collapse I couldn't give you anything logical to tell you why i though the way I did, other than.. Its proven to me that it wont.

From a religious point of view, I think BOTH of the above apply at the same time. And they both form part of the spiral. The more we learn of god,the more we are willing to trust and rely on him, the more we experience of his trustworthiness, the more we are willing to trust him based on experience.

Sorry, I didn't what to turn this into a leacture... apologies if it comes across that way.

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Let me start by saying that I actually haven't tried to put this into words myself before.. This is all something in which I operate mostly on instinct, and your question has given me an opportunity to sit down and think through exactly how my thought processes work.

As such, this is all reasonably new thinking for me.. I'm trying to be honest and clear in what I'm saying.. but I'm sorry if it doesn't make sense, I would almost guarantee you that at least 80% of people of Faith would disagree with at least some of what I'm saying. But hey, Ask me in 6 months and I'm sure ill think i was wrong on at least a little bit of it.
All that said, this is my best attempt to put into words a further answer to your question. As much for my own use as for yours, but hey.

Ok.. Let keep going with this chair. I have a chair which I have sat in so many times, that I am as sure as I can be that it wont collapse. My faith in this chair is largely based in experience, since I have sat in it so many times before. It can get to the point where to someone else, this faith might seem unreasonable. They might point out to me what appears to them to be a structural inconsistency in the chair, but I can, confident in the experiential faith I have in the chair, confidently sit in it in spite of this.

This is the point where I'm gonna drop the chair, cause a good analogy can only go so far. Here's where I'm trying to go with this. As far as religion is concerned, religious faith can appear frequently to be blind faith. And sometimes it is. I must admit I've been challenged by this stream of conversation/conciousness, If someone were to attempt to disprove to me my faith in God, whether experientially or logically, would I give them a fair hearing? Or would I be so tied up in my own faith, that I would reject what they had to say out of hand.

Good faith, solid faith, faith that is worthwhile, is faith that is capable of changing. This faith can be either more firmly proven or disproven, resulting in a change to the way you react or act towards the thing the faith is based on/in. I honestly don't know how I would react if someone did effectivly challenge my faith, I hope that my faith could be this "good faith", that I would be willing to at least consider that I could be wrong. that my faith wouldn't be completely blind.

Sorry that was an aside.. Religious faith frequently appears to be, and sometimes is, blind. I would postulate that this is often because the person looking at this faith externally is looking at it from a completely logical, structured view, and not understanding why someone who faith is largely experientially based can't see what he sees.

Someone might raise a good logical argument, let's be specific... "Why does God allow suffering in the world then". I don't have a logical answer to this. I have theories, but that's not the point here. What I do have is a knowledge and experience of God, If he is allowing this kind of thing to happen then he is doing so for the right reasons. As far as I am concerned, based upon my knowledge and experience of God, he would NEVER needlessly do something like that, so It must be for some greater, higher purpose. I don't know for sure what that purpose is. But I trust that if I TRUELY understood it, I would think it was indeed right.

This is not a completely satisfactory answer, even for me, but It does allow me to accept that while I don't know the reasons, I have faith that they are good ones.

The other point I feel I need to make is this. There is a small gap in the chair analogy. Well not really.. Its a good analogy for faith. But there is one small thing that makes faith in God DIFFERENT, in my understanding at least. Here it is. God Doesn't change. In the course of normal faith, the thing you have faith in can change, such that a faith that was reasonable one day, can become unreasonable the next. If both the back legs of my chair fell off, I wouldn't sit down on it anymore, in spite of my prior experiences. The same does not, to my understanding of him, hold true for God. His back legs cant fall off. Consequently, experiential knowledge is far more valuable when applied to faith in God than when it is applied to other faith.

I feel like I haven't explained most of this very well, but I hope its been of /some/ use.