You think I'm wrong, and you appear to think the reasons I am wrong are obvious.
Well, you see, two comments ago you were telling me I was wrong for obvious reasons. You told me that I don't understand and if I understood I wouldn't think X, when in fact I do not think X.
I will not presume to guess how subtle the reasons are for which you are wrong. But you assuredly told me, with every sign of great confidence, that I think something I don't in fact think. You are now doubling down (in that you continue to insist that I am wrong) while backing off (by now saying you think I'm subtly wrong, where what you were accusing me of before was in no way subtle). So I think you may if you please claim either intellectual or moral high ground here -- but not both.
Assume, for a moment, that I, also, am not an idiot.
I do, I assure you.
the fact that you stopped being a Christian might suggest you have a different relationship to faith than those who do not.
No shit, Sherlock. On the other hand, (1) it's not so clear that it means I had a different relationship to faith from that of other Christians, (2) the fact that I lived as a Christian among Christians for decades and remain married to one and friends with plenty more means that I'm not exactly starved of opportunities to discover or remind myself how they think, and (3) you are still writing as if all religious people think and feel the same way about these things, which is demonstrably false.
To a religious person, faith is about them proving themselves to God; evidence or non-evidence of God doesn't actually enter into it. [...] Faith isn't trusting God, it's living up to God's trust in them.
The New Testament's use of phrases like "faith of X" is notoriously ambiguous, and indeed "faith" can mean "faithfulness" in the sense of trustworthiness rather than anything to do with belief. (And, I think more often, "trusting a person" rather than anything to do with factual belief.) However, I think you are simply factually wrong if you are claiming that most use of the word "faith" by religious people in general, or Christians in particular, has that meaning; and wronger than wrong if you are claiming that "faith" can't reasonably be used to denote something closely akin to belief, which I think is what would need to be true to invalidate the suggestion that you use the word "faith" rather than "belief" to describe the particular sort of thing you feel more positive about these days than you used to.
(I remark that earlier in the thread you were clearly happy to use the word "faith" to describe a particular kind of belief or something very closely akin thereto; taking "faith" to mean anything like "trustworthiness" makes total nonsense of the comment I just linked to.)
Now, of course you may quite reasonably feel that my opinion about how Christians use the word "faith" is of no value since I am not a Christian. So let me pull a few books off my shelves and see what they say about it. (No cherry-picking; I just took the first books I found that looked like they might have something to say on the point.)
That'll do for now. The point is just this: These books -- written by Christians, mostly for Christians -- are utterly irreconcilable with the claim that "faith" in the Christian context mostly means something like trustworthiness. They mostly take it to mean a kind of belief or a kind of trust or both. Of course they also claim that it's a belief-and/or-trust with a divine origin and all sorts of marvellous consequences, and that it should have consequences for how one lives; but they do not appear to agree at all with your suggestion that it's a misuse to use "faith" to denote a kind of belief.
(They do, to be sure, make it clear that for them "faith" is not simply a synonym for "belief", but I never said or suggested or thought that it is. I mention this merely because some of what you've written seems to suggest that you think I do think that.)
I should maybe add that I've focused on Christianity here because (1) that's the religion I know best, (2) I'm pretty sure it's the religion you know best, and (3) it's one of the not-actually-so-many for which notions of "belief" and "faith" are actually a big deal.
I grew up in an atheistic household.
Almost needless to say, I was relatively hostile towards religion for most of my early life. A few things changed that.
First, the apology of a pastor. A friend of mine was proselytizing at me, and apparently discussed it with his pastor; the pastor apologized to my parents, and explained to my friend he shouldn't be trying to convert people. My friend apologized to me after considering the matter. We stayed friends for a little while afterwards, although I left that school, and we lost contact.
I think that was around the time that I realized that religion is, in addition to being a belief system, a way of life, and not necessarily a bad one.
The next was actually South Park's Mormonism episode, which pointed out that a belief system could be desirable on the merits of the way of life it represented, even if the beliefs themselves are stupid. This tied into Douglas Adam's comment on Feng Shui, that "...if you disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for it, it may be there is something interesting going on" - which is to say, the explanation for the belief is not necessarily the -reason- for the belief, and that stupid beliefs may actually have something useful to offer - which then requires us to ask whether the beliefs are, in fact, stupid.
Which is to say, beliefs may be epistemically irrational while being instrumentally rational.
The next peace I made with belief actually came from quantum physics, and reading about how there were several disparate and apparently contradictory mathematical systems, which all predicted the same thing. It later transpired that they could all be generalized into the same mathematical system, but I hadn't read that far before the isomorphic nature of truth occurred to me; you can have multiple contradictory interpretations of the same evidence that all predict the same thing.
Up to this point, however, I still regarded beliefs as irrational, at least on an epistemological basis.
The next peace came from experiences living in a house that would have convinced most people that ghosts are real, which I have previously written about here. I think there are probably good explanations for every individual experience even if I don't know them, but am still somewhat flummoxed by the fact that almost all the bizarre experiences of my life all revolve around the same physical location. I don't know if I would accept money to live in that house again, which I guess means that I wouldn't put money on the bet that there wasn't something fundamentally odd about the house itself - a quality of the house which I think the term "haunted" accurately conveys, even if its implications are incorrect.
If an AI in a first person shooter dies every time it walks into a green room, and experiences great disutility for death, how many times must it walk into a green room before it decides not to do that anymore? I'm reasonably confident on a rational level that there was nothing inherently unnatural about that house, nothing beyond explanation, but I still won't "walk into the green room."
That was the point at which I concluded that beliefs can be -rational-. Disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for them, and just accept the notion that there may be something interesting going on underneath the surface.
If we were to hold scientific beliefs to the same standard we hold religious beliefs - holding the explanation responsible rather than the predictions - scientific beliefs really don't come off looking that good. The sun isn't the center of the universe; some have called this theory "less wrong" than an earth-centric model of the universe, but that's because the -predictions- are better; the explanation itself is still completely, 100% wrong.
Likewise, if we hold religious beliefs to the same standard we hold scientific beliefs - holding the predictions responsible rather than the explanations - religious beliefs might just come off better than we'd expect.