Faith really is a crock of horse shit.
It's a failed epistemology in that it can't be a path to the truth for multiple incompatible belief systems.
Yet for some reason, we still seem to accept faith as a virtue despite all evidence to the contrary.
WTAF?
@stuartblair: People conflate it with hope. It also has a lot to do with identity, ego, in some cases id, and not infrequently power and distraction.
@thedisasterautist like spirituality, I think faith is one of those terms that's just semantically overloaded. If we instead used the phrase 'belief without evidence' or 'unsupported belief', I think it'd be a much better world.
@stuartblair: Folks don't like acknowledging things for what they are, especially attitudes and behaviors. That said, reframing some things in order to relieve some of the mental load is quite useful. Also, people tend to prefer clinging to traditions for a sense of personal and community history and identity, even if it's obviously fiction, even if it can be self-destructive or extrovertedly destructive. Humans are still primates, after all.
@thedisasterautist true, but it seems increasingly apparent that our survival as a species might hinge on whether we can collectively agree to move past the primacy of our traditions.
I'm not arguing that we should abandon them. It's more that we should treat them like we might a childhood teddy bear. They call back to who we were without constraining who we'll be now.
Climate change will bring resource wars and migration on a scale we've not seen in our history.
We can't afford faith.
@stuartblair: That said, I must confess that it is my considered belief that Humanity's Great Filter is almost certainly going to be its own nature. I give super-slim odds that anything like Star Trek and such type civilizations ever come to pass. That's going by the historical data and the math.
@stuartblair: I'm not referencing traditions but human nature, emotions, the "lizard brain" and "monkey brain". I'm referencing stupid people and willfully, even proudly ignorant people, not to mention manipulative, skullduggerous, greedy, self-serving asswipes. There's no getting rid of those for the very fact that they exist. Human nature is manageable on an individual level and a small group level, but beyond that it isn't. Force winds up requisite, and that usually makes things worse.