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Pick your favorite ancient European or Middle Eastern religious or philosophical writing and look at the actual usage of the word "faith" (or the word translate
by lotharbot 16y ago
Pick your favorite ancient European or Middle Eastern religious or philosophical writing and look at the actual usage of the word "faith" (or the word translated as "faith"). You'll find that its definition is something along the lines of "reasonable acceptance of a proposition based on evidence" with the followup of "acting upon that proposition in the face of emotional uncertainty". Or, more simply, classical faith is the triumph of reason and experience over emotion and fickleness.
It's only been about the last 140 years (with the rise of Christian Fundamentalism and the associated mysticism and anti-intellectualism) that "faith" has been used to refer to belief without reason or evidence. The parent poster is moving the goalposts, but he's moving them back toward where they actually belong.
- sofal 16y agoIt doesn't matter where you think the goalposts should be. Moving them in order to make a counterpoint is a fallacy.
- lotharbot 16y agoIt's not a fallacy to move the goalposts back to where they belong after someone else has misplaced them. It is only a fallacy when the same person places them in one place and then another.
- sofal 16y agoMaybe we're not seeing eye to eye on what was being said. erikpukinskis defined faith as "unexamined, culturally imprinted beliefs". Okay, fine. Then he states that atheists imagine they are free of those. crasshopper's comment basically means (correct me if I'm wrong), "don't assume that atheists imagine they are free of unexamined, culturally imprinted beliefs." I agree. At most, atheists claim freedom from a more severe subset of those kinds of beliefs specifically regarding religion. PakG1 then stretches the definition of faith to include even those beliefs which are examined and based on knowledge and past evidence. Let me know where you think the first misplacement was.
- lotharbot 16y agoThe first misplacement was long before this comment thread. But erik was the first to explicitly state it and use it in an argument (arguing for a position I would not agree with.) That said, PakG1 is not stretching the definition of faith, he's correcting it. It is appropriate to classify erik's position as incorrect and his definition as lacking, but not to classify Pak's correction as a fallacy.
- mikeklaas 16y agoNot much longer than 140 years ago, /nice/ had pretty much the opposite meaning it does now. You can't just pick a word's meaning from hundreds of years ago (worse, a foreign-languag equivalent) and drop it into modern conversation without stating that that's what you're doing.
- lotharbot 16y agoLet me state it more strongly: the definition of faith I gave is not only the historical standard from prior to 140 years ago, it's also the modern standard among religious scholars and in most religious traditions. It's only in the last 140 years, within one particular anti-intellectual religious tradition (and among critics whose primary experience is with that tradition), that "faith" means the other thing. Their usage is decidedly in the minority. As such, I think it's perfectly fair for people to use the more correct definition, and it's unreasonable for those who are ignorant of that definition to cry foul when presented with it.