Over time we all die ...

@Bigwavedave Yeah ... but not sure how the fact we're mortal is relevant to the topic. It's a separate issue to me. When I say "life finds a way" I'm really just channeling Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park, and talking at the scale of societal evolution. It's true that you or I are unlikely to be able to enjoy a beer together 1,000 years from now and laugh about how right or wrong I ultimately was about religion descending into irrelevance and marginality. But still ... I'm "optimistic", relatively, about the long-term prospects of the human experiment. Whether I'll get to see much more of it, or even whether I much want to, is beside the point.

Thank you. I like that thought.

Best answer ever!

@Bigwavedave you're welcome. I'm a high functioning depressed person; anxiety sets in when I'm looking at a 'possible' finished result of a huge task, or issue... without knowing for sure how the results will turn out. Speculation, is the main trigger of anxiety. When anxiety sets in, you lose the motivation you had, when this big issue or task came about. Taking one day at a time, one thing at a time, one step at a time, you sometimes surprise yourself at how unstressed you become. Suddenly, the world around you isn't so foreboding and you can only be certain of one thing....that the world might be fucked up beyond repair, but you're definitely gonna be okay.

Religious faith isn't believing things that aren't true, but a strong tendency to believe things, many of which are highly unlikely to be true, by accepting asserted truth without a requirement of evidence to substantiate it.

Faith in the colloquial, generic sense is reasonable belief based on past experience and evidence -- almost the opposite of religious faith. In that context I prefer to use the word trust, to avoid confusion with the religious meaning.

"Knowing how to access heartfelt joy independent of material circumstances" is not faith, it is finding hope and meaning and purpose in the midst of whatever you have to work with. That involves not having a rigid, sequential requirement of how things must or should play out, it involves patience, tolerance and often an impractically long view of things, but one learns how to do it or one swings from the rafters. Call it faith if you want, of course, but faith is such an overloaded and hijacked word that I prefer to avoid it outside the religious context because everyone's brain gravitates to the religious context with that word.

@mordant
Other people’s brains are free to do whatever they wish, but they don’t get to dictate what my brain does. I realize I’m fighting a losing battle, but I can’t just sit idly by and watch the language being degraded without expressing my displeasure. (And I think history vindicates me.) If we are squeamish about resisting thieves they will take everything. Fundamentalists have no legitimate claim of ownership of the words they have muddied. Our cultural heritage is much broader and richer than a narrow and brittle literalist perspective of faith and matters of human spirit (attitude, intention, etc. ).

There is a deeper sense of the word “faith” that I think is more historically accurate in this context, and should not be allowed to drift into obscurity. That is a steadfast loyalty to truth, no matter what is popular or expedient. The irony of people who believe in literal sky gods making it unfashionable for me to speak of being faithful to truth is just more painful than I can bear without squawking a bit.
Keep the faith!

@skado I understand your distress, actually, at least intellectually. Coming as I do from fundamentalism I may at times overestimate the fundamentalist influence on popular usage -- but probably not, because given fundamentalism's outsize influence on politics and culture relative to their numeric share as a subset of, e.g., Christianity, I would be unsurprised to discover that they also have an outsize influence on the evolution of language.

To me it is a simple question of evolution of meanings. In Elizabethan English, for example, the world "convenient" used to mean something closer to the modern usage of the words "fitting" or "appropriate", hence, when you have a KJV passage decrying "doers of that which is not convenient", it is talking about doing unseemly things. But that has changed since the 17th century to mean "involving little trouble or effort".

Does this suggest that we should insist on reclaiming the historic usage of "convenient" in order to take it back from ... well, from whoever changed the meaning? Nope. Word meaning and usage evolve, organically and inorganically, for better or worse, and in my judgment, "faith" is one of those weasel-words that has come to mean whatever someone wants it to mean and ends up mucking up any efforts at real engagement and discourse. My personal preference then is to confine it to what most people understand it to mean in a religious context, "a blind leap of faith", and to use other words in other contexts. It's not the One Right Way to do it, but it helps me make sense of it and I think it acknowledges the fait accompli of popular usage and doesn't engage in quixotic battles to try to claw already-ceded ground back.

But ... if you feel differently that is definitely your choice and not mine. At least you're clear on what you mean by faith and try to qualify it.

@mordant
Good points, all! Reasonable minds may differ on this issue. Language does evolve. I’m not pretending that should be stopped. And I’m not claiming it should always be only one way; context rules.

This is just one place where I have a pet interest, and use the situation to try to make a point about attitudes toward religion and related concepts.

I think the Dawkinses and Hitchenses have illegitimately and disproportionately skewed our associations with a small class of words that I feel like yanking back from their clutches, however quixotic that may admittedly be.

The historic use of these words is not so far in the past that retrieval would be unrealistic (modern dictionaries still list the meanings I suggest as being in current usage - not archaic). And there is more at stake here, in the culture, than tilting at linguistic windmills. “Ownership” of the language is a critical tool in the battle for sanity between modern literalism and classical metaphorical expression.

For reasons I don’t understand, Dawkins seems to want to throw the baby out and save the bath water. If I didn’t know better I’d think he hates the complexity of art and sees humanity as conforming neatly to a set of orthographic diagrams.

I love that he, Harris, et al. have taken one step in the right direction, but find it stultifying that they insist on slamming the door so closely on their heels.

@skado Lol ... you are probably right about Dawkins, what you are describing there is the heart's cry of every science nerd or techy that has ever lived. Give me objectivity or at least intersubjective agreement, I can't stand abstractions and metaphors and intuition and often not even love. I fight it myself. Not entirely successfully. But I can cop to it at least.

@mordant
I have that same impulse in me, to some degree, but a friend pointed out the value of metaphoric language to me a few years back, and the idea found fertile ground in my artistic side. Since then it has grown to a conviction that there is room in most of us for both, and it need not constitute a conflict. That seed has engendered so much peace of mind for me... I try to pass it along.

Lol great answer . Thank you.

Where was the science? Why use children to tug on heart strings? Why not provide data to back up your positions?

Just sounded like a child making threats backed by government force.

Pretty sad.

A large majority of scientists warned us about it for years, But our leaders corrupt by fossil fuel money didn't bulge.
[ipcc.ch]