| (by "we", i guess i mean most people.
it may not always include me, but it tends to.
you might not fit into this, but you probably will.
faith as i use it in this entry, and only in this entry,
is belief without empirical evidence to provide grounds for it.
this whole entry is just an exercise showing that this is a really broad category.)
1. We have faith that the physical world exists. We can't prove that it exists with evidence that doesn't already presuppose it exists; in other words, we can't prove that it exists without circular reasoning. So we're left to hope that we're not living in someone else's dream.
2. We have faith that we are agents. A dose of physics should dispell the rumour that we are responsible for our beliefs and actions. Instead, we just limit physics, and continue on happily believing that we are things that control our destinies.
3. We have faith in the goodness of humanity. (This is despite my lit. professor's insistence that "humanity" is a category that can be deconstructed and done away with for any other category that would be just as valid. And he also believes in the goodness of humanity.)
3.5. We have faith in the badness of humanity.
4. We have faith that we are of equal worth to each other. What's so interesting about the idea of intrinsic worth is that it's almost a self-contradiction since, almost always, a thing's worth is a label placed upon it by something else. But when we talk about human beings, we believe they are somehow equal (not in size, length or color, but) in worth, and we believe that that is an essential trait - not a contrived or somehow constructed thing. 5. We have faith in people we love. When she moves to another school, none of your phone conversations will settle your doubts about her loyalty (if doubts begin to arise in the first place). You won't be able to map out her whereabouts or find out who she's been talking to from tapping her phones. If you are sane, you won't need to, because you know she will remain yours. You know this for no other reason except that you love her and you trust her when she said that she loves you, too. I told this to someone who responded that, when he has a girlfrend, he will take as the default position that she is cheating on him, unless he had sufficient scientific, falsifiable, repeatable evidence to prove otherwise. To my knowledge, he is still single.
6. We have faith that we will eventually find someone we were meant to be with (and if we don't, we're not bitter about it). Is it just a trick of language that we tend to use superlatives to describe life? Don't we secretly believe that there is a guiding purposer behind and beyond it all? "I don't believe in God, but I miss him." If you're down with my definition for faith-belief (which I won't use in the future), you'd agree that we do take alot of things on faith, whether we'd like to or not. And, contrary to the accusation that faith is for the paranoid, the superstitious and the fearful few, faith is elemental to the human experience. The people who reject all forms of faith (if there are any people like that) must be the ones who are paranoid and cynical. What separates us from other animals is not our knowledge, but our faith. |
