Moderate Faith vs Pure Atheism: Society

superluminal said:
Faith is for doofuses.
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Notice the first two definitions of faith in one online dictionary:

faith
1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability.
2. belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact.

We all live by faith. We do not seek proof for many things we take for granted. And certainly as little epistemologists, well, we accept faith in our epistemology.

In our assumptions....
In our sense of liklihood...
In our ability to decide when we should search for more evidence...
In our senses, the vast majority of the time...

And so on....

Anyone who doesn't have some form of faith would be spending all their time trying to prove things and would not be a productive member of society. Further they would be a strong skeptic and there are many problems with that stance.
 
Sorry, I mean religious faith. Don't try to lump the subjective faith that a friend has in another in with religious faith. Religious faith is a special beast. It claims and absolute truth for something with no objective or absolute proof. It's a special kind of insanity that insists the reality and certainty of a thing while at the same time applying a word (faith) that most people don't even realize is completely incompatible with certainty.
 
superluminal said:
Sorry, I mean religious faith. Don't try to lump the subjective faith that a friend has in another in with religious faith. Religious faith is a special beast. It claims and absolute truth for something with no objective or absolute proof. It's a special kind of insanity that insists the reality and certainty of a thing while at the same time applying a word (faith) that most people don't even realize is completely incompatible with certainty.
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I included definition one, but my focus was on 2. And again. We all believe in things with certainty that have not been proved to us. Some of them cannot be proved. Brain in a vat and Descartes demon issues for one. That our assumptions about how to gain knowledge are correct. How we related to what our senses tell us about the world. Where to not trust our intuition, despite the fact that we make this decision using intuition. Faith in the continuity of the self through time. Faith in our ideas about what language is doing. And so on.
 
Norsefire asked "Which is better?" and in 7 pages not one person said "I don't know"?

Am I just too pessimistic (optimistic?) in thinking that without theism, humanity would've ended up with the same amount of good and evil?
 
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