Faith: a Release of Insanity That no Rubber Room Can Contain

Faith: a Release of Insanity That no Rubber Room Can Contain


First, let's define faith.
Faith - Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.

The only reason people believe in God is faith.

With faith, you can make up anything, and believe in anything, among them: the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Invisible Pink Unicorn, God, and the Orbiting Celestial Teapot. All of which could be possible, but are pretty stupid, illogical and unfounded.

Let me put that in an even more critical light: people in insane asylums often have nothing more to support their beliefs than faith. One that believes he is superman will have enough faith to believe in it.

Sam Harris, from Beyond Belief 2006, describes this more powerfully than I can:

If you don't hold things up to a scientific and logical standard and just believe in things by making them up, which is the equivalent of faith, then you open the door to every possible insane belief. The only thing that seperates the insane beliefs from the sane ones based on faith is that people are insane together en masse and thus are a force that no rubber room can contain.

In fact, consider this:
Faith is basically saying that in cases where the all the evidence points one direction and there is no evidence in another direction, you can find it of sound mind to believe that the direction where no evidence is pointing and all evidence is pointing away from is the best choice.

All I'm advocating is making the best choices and faith-based decisions are not the best choice.

This is like making a bet on how many times a coin will land on tails and how many times a coin will land on heads if you flip it 100 times. The best choice is to bet on it landing 50 times heads and 50 times tails. The faith based choice would be to chose 100 times heads and 0 times tails because all the evidence points torwards 50:50 but none of it points towards 100:0.

Thus, by gambling on 100:0 you are gambling on a position that is believed without any evidence and so by definition is faith-based, even if it intuitively just feels right.

The faith based decision could be right, but only once every 100^2 times, or once every ten-thousand times. Any professional gambler in Vegas would tell you that the faith-based guy is about to lose a lot of money.

 

There's not really much here to argue, since I'm in agreement with you. All I'm going to say is that your gambling analogy is an interesting way of abstracting the concept of Faith.

Also, Pastafarianism for life!!