gjm comments on Making My Peace with Belief - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
I do, I assure you.
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.
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.