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Faith Faith is a personal moral characteristic. It is depending upon the medium of objective reality.
Faith is a personal moral characteristic. It's the ability of the person to enter the medium of objective reality which defines life instead of using sin (fraud and lies) as a crutch and short-cut to results. It's like a fish entering the water of life instead of being beached on the sand of sin. What is good for one person is good for all. Faith is universalizing existence, so people can interact properly. Unified reality, truth, reason and justice do this, while sin destroys faith. The key to understanding the difference between corrupt faith and constructive faith is that power is the central concern of corrupt faith, and rationality is the central concern of constructive faith. With these assumptions about power, false faith says trust us and give us more power through allegiance. Constructive faith says get involved in our process of rationality, because it solves problems. The Basic Concepts of Faith. Faith is the universality in a person's mind. Understanding is the unified reality in the mind, so it makes up a large part of faith. Then relating to the universe as a unified reality is applying faith. In over-simplified terms, it's easy to say faith is a relationship to the universe. But it is also a relationship to other persons, and this part is very tricky to evaluate. So here's the lowdown: It might seem surprising, but faith looking upward to power sources is a corruption, while faith looking downward is a virtue. The reason is because faith looking to power sources means someone controlling someone. There is no constructive way for someone to control someone. The desire to do so is the basis of all sin, which is domination. But faith looking down breaks lines of control. It is allowing others to do something with less control or domination. But isn't control necessary? Would not lack of control be irresponsible? No. Control freaks assume they are solving someone's problems, but they are dead to sin. The concept of responsibility needs to be understood. Responsibility is not control. Not only would control corrupt, but it would be grossly incomplete. What happens where control leaves off? Everything fails. Instead, responsibility is preparing and preventing. Preparing includes knowledge; and preventing includes restrictions, like the speed limit. Responsible driving isn't controlling the driver. It obviously wouldn't work. It is knowledge, discipline and laws. The laws restrict, but they obviously cannot control. Faith cannot defy these principles. Instead, it is working with them. It is depending upon knowledge and preparedness rather than control. This means that if faith is associated with God, it doesn't mean God controlling people. When Christ mentioned faith in God (Mark 11:22), was he talking about controlling people? He did no controlling. He taught. Faith in Christ means believing and studying what he taught. He taught; he did no controlling. Management is not a control process, because control doesn't work. For this reasons, workers need a lot of training and experience to function without being controlled. Managers tell workers what to do, and they do it on their own. God's relationship to humans is even farther removed than managers in the workplace. God makes things possible, but people have to make the right choices through their moral awareness. View believers as a workforce. They need to be educated, trained and experienced to be constructive and moral. Educated, trained and experienced is a relationship to the unified reality which makes up life. Faith is this relationship to the universe. What then does it have to do with God? God creates life and sustains it through a standard called morality. Getting constructive and moral is joining God's project for life, which is what faith in God means. There can be some looking upward in faith, but it is not the control mechanism that predominates in satan's world. Faith is only looking upward for knowledge and direction; and most of this is found everywhere in the universe, as God uses the objective medium to define and sustain life. The Application of Faith in Life. Sin destroys faith, because it destroys a person's relationship to other people and the universe. Faith is relying upon other people and the universe. Corrupt persons have to pull everything toward themselves, which is selfishness, because sin puts them in conflict with the universe, and the assumption is that the universe can be changed to justify the sin. But other persons do not pull everything toward someone else, so other persons cannot be relied upon to justify one's own sin. Because of these forces, corrupt persons have to push their way into everything and prevent other persons from having anything to say about anything. That pushiness is the absence of faith. Frauds have brainwashed society on faith to such an extent that I cannot just describe what faith is. I must first address the frauds. Nowhere in the Bible besides Paul's theology does it say people are saved by faith without works. Here's what Isaiah said: "Bring no more worthless offerings...your hands are full of blood...learn to do good. Make justice your aim: redress the wronged, hear the orphan's plea, defend the widow." (Isaiah 1:13-17). Everything Christ taught was the human responsibilities (works) required for getting saved. Paul's contradiction of the rest of the Bible shows that Paul was a fraud, not that the rest of the Bible is wrong. The purpose of this web page is to describe the complex characteristics of faith. Since faith is so mysterious and arguable, Christ should be the one who defines what it is. He taught human responsiblities and said only the do-gooders get saved (Mat 25:31-46). But sin and the corrupt theology of Paul cause people to assume faith is the opposite—that it is to do nothing and expect God to take care of everything. Notice this contradiction: they don't let God do everything when they are imposing their sin onto others. Faith is extending constructivity outward. It contains all of the complex elements of morality. Being the most advanced element of morality, it is the most easily destroyed. Sin destroys faith. Often, faith is assumed to be irrational. Atheists deride faith for being irrational, and fundamentalists put faith above rationality claiming their assumptions can be illogical and still correct, because faith is superior to rationality. It can't be constructive if it conflicts with rationality. This occurs because faith has no discernible meaning to most persons. Therefore, it is the perfect tool for rationalizing the irrational. Why not use it to promote whatever needs promoting. What needs to be promoted in religion is a fix for sin. There's no better fix for anything than snakeroot oil. In religion, the snakeroot oil is faith. It cures whatever ails you. Just like snakeroot oil, the propaganda faith is a cure in name only. Being in conflict with evidence and rationality, it puts supposed believers in conflict with the world around them. A description of faith is found in Hebrews 11:1. It says "Faith is confident assurance concerning what we hope for, and conviction about things we do not see." In most minds, this would be the equivalent of blind faith, assuming that to "not see" means to not know. The quote could be rationalized due to its vagaries, but its usual interpretation is that faith does not need to be based on anything but a person's own whim. Notice that the more corrupt that type of faith gets, the purer it gets. Gambling is an example. Expecting to win in Las Vegas is that type of faith. In other words, the writer of Hebrews did not know how to separate real faith from gullibility. You have to realize that the writers of the epistles of the New Testament didn't have everything figured out. Paul said (in a muddled way) people do not need anything more than faith to get saved (Gal 2:16)—that is, faith in a pagan ritual causing God to forgive sin. To Paul, faith was just a fix-all slogan replacing the need for overcoming sin. But in fact, faith is the culmination of all other moral characteristics and cannot exist without morality. Christ applied faith to many diverse situations demonstrating that it is an inherent element of all that people do. Examples include healing the sick (Mark 5:34), casting out demons (Mat 17:20), walking on water (Mat 14:31), moving mountains (Mat 21:22), and providence (Luke 12:28). From the definition of faith in Hebrews and Christ's examples, we see that faith involves dependence. But dependence could be corrupt. It's dependence with knowledge that creates faith. Without knowledge, it's gullibility, which is commonly called blind faith. Knowledge and morality are interdependent creating a chicken and egg phenomenon. Morality creates a value and need for knowledge, since constructivity depends upon knowledge. Sin creates nihilism as a hate for knowledge, because truth exposes the sin. When adding up all of the concepts which go into faith, it demonstrates that faith is a product of morality. Morality has to exist before faith can exist. How then can faith replace all other responsibilities in fundamentalist theology? Supposedly, sin cannot be overcome, but the sinner is said to be justified through faith in a pagan ritual called atonement. The sinner is supposed to start with faith. Relying upon faith without overcoming sin is starting at the end point. The only reason why faith is given the role of a magical fix in Paul's theology is because it was so mysterious that it could be exploited in creating a substitute theology for the difficult path of overcoming sin. The logic is that no one can really overcome sin; so instead faith does it all. That's like saying General Motors cannot really make car parts, so instead they create automobiles. The end result cannot be a substitute for the components that go into it. The document of the pope's titled Faith and Reason (1998) is interpreted to mean faith and reason are interdependent. external link (9kb) Faith Intuitively Described. Here's a plain and simple description of the problem in common terms. Faith is the central concern of religion. So religion is often called faith. But there are two types of faith—satan's type and God's type. Faith is the total effect of moral character. It is complex. Faith is to morality as IQ (Intelligent Quotient) is to the mind. So of course, satan's version is going to be as corrupt as his moral character. The problem is, people are taught satan's version of faith instead of the moral version. Satan's version of things is always easier to learn, because there is no wrong way to screw things up. Any old way will do. Is there a wrong way to destroy an automobile? It's sure a lot easier to destroy an automobile than create one. So let's compare the two types of faith under actual conditions. Here's what one type looks like: Catholics now learn their theology by singing songs. Here's how one of them goes: "Take our hearts, Oh Father, we are yours. Take our minds, Oh Father, we are yours. Take our lives, Oh Father, we are yours. We are yours." Here's how the other faith goes. Christ told Peter to walk on water (Mat 14:28-31). Peter sank. "How little faith you have," Christ said. Elsewhere, the disciples could not expel a demon, because they had too little faith (Mat 17:16-21). when the disciples ask Christ to increase their faith, he taught them subservience (Luke 17:5-11). Now compare these two types of faith. One is where a person is used as a tool by controllers. The other is where a person develops character which is learned through study and teaching and developed through constructive habits. Notice that Christ was gone, when the disciples failed to expel a demon due to lack of faith (Mat 17:16-21). He wasn't controlling them. The faith was supposed to come out of their character. When Christ was not controlling Peter, he failed to walk on water. The faith was supposed to come out of his character. And how does the faith get inside of a person? Christ taught a lesson in subservience (Luke 17:5-11). In the moral world of saved souls, people are not controlled or used. They are free and make their own decisions. They learn how through study, while Christ teaches. But in satan's world, people known nothing and have no responsibilities. They turn themselves over to controllers who use them. They call it faith. Satan's faith is a tool for destruction.
Faith and Reason Social Darwinism |