Redefining Faith

Too many false religions, false beliefs, and inconsistent philosophies owe their existence to a ridiculous and incorrect concept of faith. Irrational faith, unsupported faith, hysterical faith, screaming faith, and fanatical faith has caused the suffering and unhappiness of billions. Faith requiring unshakable, unswerving, unquestioned, and complete dedication to unfounded, unreasonable, un-evidenced, and mystic falsehoods has given us the crusades, the jihad, the holocaust, not to mention years of self inflicted suffering and unhappiness in slavery to imposters of the truth. What's worse, the very fact that a belief is unsubstantiated often is used as evidence of faith's supposed greatness. This is absolute idiocy.

So what is faith, if not the belief in the unbelievable? Faith is an action of the rational and logical mind. Faith is anticipating an increase in truth from a source of already received truth. When we have faith, it is true we believe something we do not yet know, but there must be a consistent reason for that belief. Faith is not blind, it is not given freely, and it should never be unquestioned. Faith is an evolving, seeking, reaching thing by which we intuitively search for truths.

Furthermore, once we hold faith in a particular idea, that is not enough. Faith is not the goal, it is a tool. We attain faith and then must continue to strive for complete knowledge. Finding knowledge will be a sequential, step by step process of having faith in an apparently reasonable idea, testing and applying the idea, reevaluating our faith to adjust, reject, or confirm it and always moving forward in the search for knowledge. When we view faith as the ever-changing tool to true knowledge. Faith is useful, thought evoking, and most importantly, will contribute to our personal happiness. Finally, faith is too often associated only with religion. The principle of faith should be applied in all fields. Obviously this is only possible if faith is a consistent and useful principle, not the cow dung found in popular religion. Faith to the Eternalist is simply a continuously examined belief in logical conclusions based upon established truths. What else would be reasonable?