View Single Post
Old 05-19-2008   #52 (permalink)
kevmartin
Reliable Music I Got Left To
 
kevmartin's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 977
Default Re: Vatican: It's OK for Catholics to Believe in Aliens

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rasczak View Post
Which is putting faith in your understanding of things and/or ability to choose right?

You can't really separate faith from anything we do or believe, religious or otherwise.
If you really want to get down to it, this is true - when I pick up the coffee cup, I am having 'faith' that it isn't a hallucination and my hand won't go right through it, and when I drive through a green light, I'm having 'faith' that drivers on the corresponding red lights will stop rather than plough right into me. But I have evidence in both those cases to support my belief. To my mind that is what makes something faith - the lack of evidence (and anecdotal or dogmatic 'evidence' be it from a pulpit or elsewhere is not really evidence). We have to draw our own lines as to what is real, and if you choose to fully believe in something without any real evidence is a different thing to rationalizing it out. Of course there are layers upon layers upon layers to our beliefs too, each belief based on other pre-determined belief - we have to do this so we don't spend life considering every aspect of every decision over and over, so it just becomes subconsciously 'filed' as established fact (e.g. I can rely on the 'fact' that the coffee cup is real so it's ok to put it in the coffee maker and fill it with coffee - maybe a boring example but it's early and it will suffice).
___________________________

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
- John Lennon
kevmartin is offline   Reply With Quote