Smasharoo wrote:
Faith is hope in things unseen.
By you, right? Unseen by you. Faith in very specific things other people have asserted are true. Not faith in "something more than perceived reality" but "Faith a lamb will open a series of seals and the dead will rise". You can see how those aren't the same thing, right?
Not really. Maybe.
I had an average enough knowledge of the Lamb religion most of my life. In that case it was something other people had asserted was true but I didn't have faith in the word of those people or in the word of the people that wrote the Bible.
If I am understanding you correctly you are saying that the only valid faith can only come from purely subjective internal perception of reality and that if anything I have faith in has happened to have been cataloged elsewhere in history then it somehow makes is less valid? Or I could also assume that what is underlying in your statement is that since, internally, faith and hope and simply cognitive processes that "anything goes" because anybody can have hope in anything anyway.
I admit that I am guilty of boldly asserting that there is a reality of a sort of "archetypal hope" in the human condition for complete peace, harmony, safety, joy, wonder, and-the-rest..
There can be hope for those things being that you have faith in something, right? Many people do not dare to have those kinds of hopes because they have no reason to assume that there is anything that exists to bother putting their faith in that could possibly achieve this. It's a circular state of affair that is only broken by having the faith.. and people can even fool themselves into having false faith and what I mean by "false faith" is irrational faith which sounds redundant. However, because faith is the evidence of what we hope for if our hopes our corrupted then that which we put our faith in is also going to be corrupted.. hence all of the death from religions and ideologies.
If we adhere that there is one true hope - like I said, the archetypal "heaven" state that cultures around the world crow about and atheists blame god for not making fast enough.. that unseen and unimaginable state of existence, in my opinion, should be and can be the ultimate hope for all people. We can have hopes in any number of things; but foremost if we do not hope for that than I feel we are selling ourselves short.
That is why I feel what I said is justified.