Path: ultra.sonic.net!news From: tyagi@arkaotika.abyss.com (tyaginator) Newsgroups: alt.consciousness.mysticism,talk.religion.misc,talk.religion.newage,alt.magick.tyagi,alt.skeptic,alt.atheism Subject: DBarton: Faith and Belief Date: 27 Mar 1999 02:22:14 -0800 Organization: Sonoma Interconnect,Santa Rosa,CA(us),http://www.sonic.net Lines: 76 Message-ID: <7dibgm$kh7@bolt.sonic.net> Reply-To: dlb@wash.inmet.com NNTP-Posting-Host: bolt.sonic.net X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.1 (NOV) Xref: ultra.sonic.net alt.consciousness.mysticism:26489 talk.religion.misc:282176 talk.religion.newage:98509 alt.magick.tyagi:16543 alt.atheism:749053 [from tariqas@world.std.com: David Barton ] I've been staying out of this one; I know, darn well, that it hooks the old ego / commanding self. I've stopped myself physically from posting once or twice. But I just lost the battle. Sigh. Michael Graffam writes: You are talking faith. Believing something to be true even when you have no verifiable reasoning for it.. and as long as we are quoting the wisdom of children: "Faith is believing what you know ain't true" - anonymous schoolboy No, darn it! No, NO, NO!!! Faith is *not* believing something when you have on reason or experience. Faith is believing something that you know to be true, on the basis of reason or experience, when a momentary blow or situation threatens to upset that reasoned belief. Faith is my wife allowing me to drive across the Delaware Memorial Bridge in spite of her fright. She knows, by reason and experience, that we will arrive safely. This doesn't stop the fear, and without faith she would refuse because of that fear. She has faith in me, and in my driving, and thus sits there. I have fingernail marks in my arm, but she sits there. Faith is believing in the love of God when you have lost a loved one. Experience and reason have not changed; everything that led you to believe in God before the unexpected death is still there. But grief can overwhelm everything, and without faith supporting reason and experience that belief can disappear regardless of how well grounded it is. Faith is maintaining my belief in God in the face of a single logical argument that you can't find the answer to right that second. It means I know that wise, logical people that I respect and love have, down through the ages, believed in God, and that I know their abilities in reason are superior to mine. *IF*, after careful review and consulting other people, I find that the argument is unassailable I may stop believing in God (and at that point faith will have nothing to do with it). Faith supports reason and experience, it does not oppose it. If I find my faith opposing my reason and / or my experience, then I have some work to do. Putting off that work because I have "faith" is not meritorious, it is lazy. Faith in a teacher must indeed be complete; however, it must be based on reason and experience. If reason and experience is not present, then it is a virtual certainty that you will be misled. The experience is the "call of the heart", and the reason is the examination of the teacher's beliefs and writings (if they exist). People seem to think this is somehow different from the rest of our lives, but it is not. My wife's faith in her skating coach is absolute; when he asks her to do something that she doesn't understand and he just says do it and you'll see, she does it. This is because he has been where she wants to go, just as a Sufi teacher has been where I want so much to go. So saying that faith and reason are opposed, or that they operate in different areas, is always one of my buttons. Faith supports reason and experience. Faith in the absence of reason and experience is credulity and laziness, and is probably born of one of the many conditioning techniques at which our society excells. Mind you, all of us have this kind of credulity in one thing or another; we are all victims of that conditioning. But calling it faith (by my definition, at least) does not make it so, any more than calling a tail a leg makes it a leg. Dave Barton <*> dlb@intermetrics.com )0( http://www.intermetrics.com/~dlb EOF