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Define Faith...

I define faith as believing in something that is obviously false. Belief in something that is clearly impossible, untrue, a lie.

"In spite of the fact that George drank every day for 17 years, Jan had faith that he would stop today."

"faith of a mustard seed you can command a mountain to move"

Faith is belief in the ridiculous, the stupid, the invisible, the unproven, the impossible. Faith is identical to delusion.

It does not take faith to belief in things like scientific theories, because they are obviously true. They come with evidence. Faith is belief that the world is 6000 years old in spite of overwhelming physical, falsifiable evidence to the contrary.

How do you define faith?

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Permalink Reply by Johnsky on May 2, 2010 at 5:56pm

I define faith as : Devotion to ignore or forget any and all evidence to the contrary of a concept.

If I have faith that broccoli is red, it would mean that I would ignore anyone who tells me otherwise, and I would distrust what I'm seeing when looking at broccoli.
If I have faith the bible is the word of god, it would mean that I would have to ignore ALL scientific and empirical evidence that disproves any part of the bible, also, I would have to forget any prior passage any time I find a contradiction, or make up an excuse like 'god meant to confuse me'.

Intentional Ignorance : This is what faith is.

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Permalink Reply by Asa Watcher on May 2, 2010 at 9:02pm

I give up on discussions when people stop making sense:
Don maintains
***”Definitions of a word always comprise its connotations.”

No they don’t. Denotations and connotations are two different things.
That’s why there are two different words.
As a matter of fact they are the opposite of each other!

My god man (excuse me) you claim to be a writer and don’t distinguish between connotation and denotation?

And your advice on gold is equally bogus.
I have experienced directly watching gold plunge in value by more than half. A couple of years ago, when gold was under $300 an oz., was when you should have bought.
Now gold is more than $1000 an oz.
What are you, a buy high, sell low guy?
You probably should not speculate with your money on faith.
Haven’t you been reading these posts?

Like you advised Johnsky:
Have you even followed this thread? Do yourself a favor and read what's come before.

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Permalink Reply by Johnsky on May 5, 2010 at 12:53am

Um... Asa? I think you have confused me with someone else... cause your reply to me there, made absolutely no sense in the context of anything I had said.

I'm not a writer, I'm a roboticist and a pianist... and I haven't given any advice on gold to my knowledge... to anyone.

I'm pretty sure you've hit the wrong "reply to" option and have gotten me confused with someone else.

I'm Johnsky a roboticist, not this 'gold advising self proclaimed writer guy'.

[MAJOR EDIT]
WHOOOOPS... I see what happened, someone replied to my post, you replied to them, they deleted their post, and it linked your reply to my post...

The site made it look like you were responding directly to me.
But their post was deleted.

Oh man... lol. Sorry if it seemed like I was being rude there.
[/EDIT]

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Permalink Reply by Asa Watcher on May 5, 2010 at 5:32pm

Yes, Johnsky, I've been confused about where posts and replies are sometimes.
I've had a reply to ryan cameron later on appear as if to dave rogers. and it made me appear as to agree with him, and not ryan. (shudder)
I'm glad to learn I'm not the only one.

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Permalink Reply by ryan cameron on May 4, 2010 at 10:40pm

EXACTLY!!!! Thank you!

That is what I'm getting at with the OP, Faith is not good, and its smokescreen is ambiguity.

It is obviously incredulous to say "I think broccoli is red". People who think that are delusional and need to be judged as so by society, and certainly not put in any position where judgment of colors is important, say, when driving.

If you have faith the earth is 6000 years old, its very important you are not allowed to teach children about geology.

This is not just about language police and wasting space, this is the very pressing need for our society to get past this dangerous religious cancer we suffer under, and not tolerate any ambiguity, least of all in our A/N ! Faith is why millions of children were sexually abused by priests. Faith is why George Bush was able to launch an illegal war in Iraq resulting in the deaths of millions. Faith is why science is unable to proceed with Stem Cell research in the US, why homosexuals are discriminated against, why racism exists. Serious stuff!

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Permalink Reply by Asa Watcher on May 3, 2010 at 12:16pm

Where did all the posts from Don go???

when I went back to my email and clicked to go to one of his responses I was told it was deleted.
By whom?
How does one delete a post?
What's up? I haven't seen this before.

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Permalink Reply by Jim DePaulo on May 4, 2010 at 9:17am

Yeah, I was wondering why you were suddenly talking to yourself.

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Permalink Reply by Asa Watcher on May 4, 2010 at 10:38am

Yea, I'm beginning to wonder myself. I don't think that "Don" was a figment of my imagination. Now, I'm not so sure.
If I could figure out how to do this trick, I could make people look really silly if they choose to reply to some off-the-wall post that I could later delete.

I wonder how he did it.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Rogers on May 4, 2010 at 11:12am

He left A/N. When you do that, everything you ever did is gone.

He was probably fed up with arguing with the Atheist Dictionary Keepers who are vane enough to think their definition of a term trumps any standard dictionary.

But this is Atheist Nexus.
This is where WE decide what faith is,

The day any atheist or atheists here decide what anything is beyond the disbelief in god or gods, is the day I'll quit this site too.

It's a shame. Don was a good man.

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Permalink Reply by Asa Watcher on May 4, 2010 at 4:36pm

Don is gone because he was in over his head and realized he didn’t know what he was talking about ... or ... he was caught being on A/N to sell a bogus gold buying scheme ... or ... he realized he was wrong when he had to defend the indefensible position that words have no specificity.

I agree with ryan cameron when he said:

***”My issue is this, religious apologists thrive on this grey-ing of terms, and the confusion between different interpretations of the word faith, and in that way, they maintain that their "faith" is good for society, even though it truly is delusional.”

And preachers weave their magic spells using words one way in one sentence and another way in the next sentence.
Try having a conversation with a Christian about “soul” for example.

Faith is a singular concept. It is also an extraordinarily simple one. Why some of you try to complicate its definition is a mystery to me, unless you are here to sabotage discussions. Is that your purpose?

So, Dave, when you write:

***”The day any atheist or atheists here decide what anything is beyond the disbelief in god or gods, is the day I'll quit this site too.”

you demonstrate two very important things:
1) You and I don’t agree as to what an atheist is,
and
2) You are in conflict with the very purpose of A/N.

Aren't we here to shuffle off this mushy coil of imprecise thinking and reasoning that plagues the theist world?
Aren't we here to impose a bit of logic, some scientific reasoning, and precision upon the language we at A/N use?

Or is it more comfortable for you to impose your linguistic ambiguity on the rest of us?

If so, Take The Nerd with you.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Rogers on May 4, 2010 at 6:43pm

Asa

I have no misgivings concerning religious faith. (I wrote this 6 months ago.)

I have no misgivings concerning the definition of atheism. I do not believe in any god or gods. It's as simple and precise as that. How anyone wants to define it beyond that is just someone's personal mental masturbation exercise. You and everyone else have every right to undertake that exercise. I usually just ignore these farts in the wind. The amount of server space taken up by the wanna-be atheist dictionary writers of this website is amazing. You're not the first and you won't be the last.

When they make you the pope of atheism you can define all the terms and set all the criteria for being a true atheist. But just as I don't give a crap what the pope of my long-gone religion has to say about anything, I could care even less what you think an atheist should be or what you think the very purpose of this website is.