Yes. Mostly.

It depends on what you mean by “faith”.

If you mean “belief that is supported by past experiences” – that belief is a rational belief. You can say that I have faith that the sun will rise the next day, but there is ample evidence to support that belief.

Faith in the religious sense – “belief in things unseen”, or even contrary to things seen – is just a way to believe things that you deeply wish were true. I could never wrap my head around that, and my inability to just have faith is what led me out of christianity and into atheism.

The real problem is one of standards – what it takes for you to believe something. If you rely on faith, you have no standard by which to choose which belief is more correct, or better.

And, in fact, that’s why so many religious people believe the way their parents believe. They were indoctrinated into that belief, and have never subjected their beliefs to rational analysis.

It’s those unexamined beliefs – whether they be religious, political, or whatever – that cause problems. It’s really hard to have rational discussions and deal with problems when you are dealing with people who believe things on faith.

Is that immoral? Yes, pretty much by definition – if you have an opinion on a subject solely because somebody (or some book) tells you, then your opinion is not a moral one.

So, I don’t think faith has much value to people. It does, however, have tremendous utility to religious and political leaders – if you have followers who believe what you say on faith, then it’s much easier to get them to do what you want.

Posted: January 5th 2010

See all questions answered by Eric_PK

This is not a simple yes or no for me.

When I meet a person who identifies herself as having faith-based beliefs, I will make the effort to see if she has the intellectual honesty not to deny evidence. She can say that the evidence is not as important as her faith-based beliefs. But, if she insists that real evidence is not evidence (like many evolution deniers do), then she is unethical in my book and not to be trusted. Her lack of intellectual integrity may not be her fault; she may have been told lies since she was a small child. However, I still would consider her functionally unethical.

I have met Christians who have deep faith and love for their god (all three of them!), who have no problem in accepting evidence, but will honestly say that they are holding out for the faith option.

I demand the same test from secular faith believers like alternative medicine followers.

What I do object to more than insisting that faith is always a vice, is that faith should never be regarded uncritically as an given good. Often, it is not a positive because many faith followers are driven by their clanging cognitive dissonance to lie and contort in order to cleave to faith.

My above explanation is dependent on the definition that faith means having non-evidential beliefs. However, if you mean faith as a set of religious values and beliefs, then most religions would come out as immoral and unethical. Specifically in the Christian faith, it is the scapegoating and the passing onto of guilt to innocent parties which makes it mired in immorality. In addition, many faiths have immoral views and take exceedingly unethical actions on abortion, contraception, opposition to advances in science, environment, and the status and rights for women, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities.

Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were men of faith and they certainly did not lack courage or were unethical (on the whole). But for demented, heart-shriveled, pathologically cruel Mother Theresa, her faith destroyed any shred of decency in her.

Posted: January 5th 2010

See all questions answered by logicel