once i have it pegged, i will be making a large multi-media presentation to share the truth i find with any who care to hear it and know ALL THAT IS.

You don't need faith for something that is readily provable.

well said!

Hey! Don't be bashing Thor worshippers now!

You say none of the religions "fit" reality well, but you make the claim of having faith, hope and love.

Are the "trinity" that you spoke of not MAJOR expectations of several currently popular religions? Aren't some or all of your "trinity" classified as one of the seven cardinal virtues?

Are these not some of the highest aims of humans?

And haven't they all been rendered in some form in all religions?

Maybe you're just spoiled for choice?

If I explained to you my reasons for this I would insult some members on here. This I try to avoid.

WE the world.

My faith that it is a shining planet under the sun which shines in reality... that is my home.

and I share it with others...

I guess the question here would be faith in what?

Faith is to believe that something is going to happen for sure. Faith in what? Yourself?

Religion and faith can be synonymous but can also not be connected.

I have faith in alot of things and have no religion.

faith in myself, faith in you, faith in humanity, faith in the power of love..the force of nature that love is, not the romantic view... and maybe the romantic view also
Faith that people are generally good, faith the there are no accidents,
so many things to have faith in..

Religion is organized faith.

A whole bunch of people agree to have a faith in some ideals. Everyone who wants to join them is asked to believe in those ideals. Those who reject the same ideals are expelled from the group.

Some groups also ask their members not to believe in some other things.

Thus, you "must" believe may in the scriptures, one or more deity, and that the instructions how to worship them will bring results.

The "must not" believe things may include other gods, a world that is more than 7000 years old, and a round Earth. (This dogma changes its shape periodically, every few thousands of years.)

Your first sentence of your response is most intriguing!

The rest, I think, is meant for misdirection.

I see you want to avoid insult and anger, but you want to say something....

Kindred spirit;though fallen; Arise! and Evanesce the Word!

Ummm....about the "round earth" comment, I don't consider spaceships and digital photography to be dogma.

I think we've proved without a doubt the earth is indeed round, well, it's a little squished at the poles...

The actual shape is called an oblate spheroid, I believe.

Sir, I do stand corrected!! to be honest, I hate Geometry and calculus...so round squished thing will have to do!!

Works for me.

AdventureBegins - the way you use language in this thread suggests to me that you understand something which few people seem to understand about the emotional experience of life, and the experience of love and faith.

I embrace the label 'weak atheist' for my view on the (non)existence of dieties. I see most everything related to religion as human-made. Still, I have faith, and faith is important to my life - though most people reading this are likely to misunderstand it, given the way that most people use that word.

Occsaoinally I have conversations with people who insist that the only acceptable use of the word faith requires that it is 'faith in' something; which may be valid given their experience of life and their experience of language use - but I think this is a sadly limited view.

You can love someone, you can love an object, you can feel loved, but a person can also experience love. Just love, without object, without an identified source.. Its a personal experience, related to a way of being, and a way of relating to yourself and everything. Similarly with faith. I don't know how to explain this, but I have experienced it. If I embraced Christianity I would use Christian metaphors to explain; a staunch materialist might bring up a discussion of brain chemistry. Many people like to box up everything with labels, even things they don't fully yet understand.

I know theists who have this faith (shown in other aspects of their existence), and whose strenght of faith is obviously closely related to their religious practice. And then there are people who somehow correlate 'strength of faith' to 'level of mindless insistence that a particular relgious dogma is true'. Reducing 'faith' to mere insistence on a claim, conviction - which is a fine use for the word, but a limited one, a sad one.

Really, its a trajedy - to think that this magnificent part of being alive 'having faith', is reduced to tool in meme warfare - becomes part of the pep rally cheering match of 'whose dogma is greater'. This wonderful experience is tied, wrongly, to allegiance to claims.

(Now Abra has said something about expectation. I haven't taken the time yet to think about this, but I suspect that the kind of faith I am speaking of is not only different from 'conviction', but also unrelated to expectation.)

What do you gain by categorizing his statements as 'sounding a lot more like Existentialism'? And what might you lose?

I do agree that religion need not relate; and it saddens me that so many only find the experience of faith through religion.

I think I tend to agree with most here in that depending on how you define the concepts will determine your answers.

For me, faith is believing in something that cannot be proven (an of course this leads to a side topic of what is proof). Religion is how that belief is expressed, whether it is an individual's personal practices or an organized set of rituals.

I don't know if anyone else would agree with this because it means that someone with compulsive disorders would be classified as religious. They would have a very strong faith that something bad will happen if they do not do something, and their individual compulsions would be classified as a ritualistic expression of their faith.

So with these definitions, I don't think you can necessarily compare which is stronger. True, one leads to another but the idea is not necessarily more powerful than the practice.

I do not believe that you can have faith without religion. Whatever belief you embrace must be expressed in some fashion. Yet you can enact religious practices without the faith (How many of us were sent to church as children without knowing or feeling the faith behind the practice?)

I know, a little different than most of the opinions here but I am contrary by nature.

Faith is a belief in something w/o proof. Period.
You can dress it up any way you want, make polite poetic prose about it, it's still a belief in something w/o proof. If you have proof, it's not faith. By definition.

I have no understanding why anyone would have faith in anything. It seems so completely intellectually lazy, I just cannot comprehend why any self-aware entity would indulge in this.

I almost missed this... my humble bad.

I have faith in my self... But only human faith (which sometimes has doubt).

my foundational faith is in 'something' greater than I.

for I have seen creation in the moment... I have held a new born human in my hands.

and I have seen evolution in my grandchild who is quicker to learn and quicker to apply that knowledge...

I have a god like faith in the human race... We are.

all of you

Upon the earth.