Believers in other faiths: How do you keep faith?

Rajni

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This is one of those questions asked in an area of the forum where the very people being discussed (in this case, those of other faiths) have insufficient privileges to reply.

So, I'm sharing it here where a more well-rounded treatment of the topic can take place, if anyone of another faith feels inclined to chime in on it.

I might contribute myself, once I can get more caffeine into my system (which probably won't be until the drywall-repairs taking place between me and the kitchen are done :yawn:).

From original thread, "How do believers in other faiths keep faith?"

Meteorim said:

It is said that God gives us the power/strength to believe. Or that God works faith in us and that without the work of the Holy Sprit non of us would believe.
How does this work for other religions? For instance, there are 1 billion Mulsims who are pretty sure of their faith. How do they believe without the Holy Spirit?




 

dlamberth

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For myself, how I keep my faith is that I'm constantly kept in remembrance by seeing the Divine everywhere I look, by keeping Love alive in my Heart and by my continuous internal dialog of gratitude which has a way of being vocalized in the mantra of a deep Heart felt "Thank You!".
 
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Tony Bristow-Stagg

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From original thread, "How do believers in other faiths keep faith?"

Meteorim said:

It is said that God gives us the power/strength to believe. Or that God works faith in us and that without the work of the Holy Sprit non of us would believe.
How does this work for other religions? For instance, there are 1 billion Mulsims who are pretty sure of their faith. How do t

@Meteorim

From a Baha'i Perspective 'Christ' which means 'Annointed One' is the a 'Station' of the Holy Spirit which our One God gives to all God's Messengers. They are all born in this world, but they one and all are Annointed with the Holy Spirit.

Thus a Baha'i sees that Christ is Noah, Abraham, Krishna, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Bab and Baha'u'llah. This is how Christ is the First and the Last, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.

Thus we all submit to and pray to One God, we are all sevants of One God, we are one people on one planet, we are here to serve each other under the Love of One God.

Regards Tony
 
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ananda

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This is one of those questions asked in an area of the forum where the very people being discussed (in this case, those of other faiths) have insufficient privileges to reply.

So, I'm sharing it here where a more well-rounded treatment of the topic can take place, if anyone of another faith feels inclined to chime in on it.

I might contribute myself, once I can get more caffeine into my system (which probably won't be until the drywall-repairs taking place between me and the kitchen are done :yawn:).

From original thread, "How do believers in other faiths keep faith?"

Meteorim said:

It is said that God gives us the power/strength to believe. Or that God works faith in us and that without the work of the Holy Sprit non of us would believe.
How does this work for other religions? For instance, there are 1 billion Mulsims who are pretty sure of their faith. How do they believe without the Holy Spirit?




"Saddha" in early Pali Buddhism is often translated "faith", "confidence", or "conviction". Saddha is directed to the Three Jewels - the Buddha, Dhamma, or Sangha - but that faith is not blind. My saddha is grounded through personal verification of the summum bonum (not by the presence of incidentals).
 
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Silmarien

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My favorite Inclusivist approach from a Christian perspective is that the Holy Spirit is present in all genuine spiritual paths--in the same way that Christ provides an "image" of what God truly is, the Holy Spirit as the more amorphous immanent presence can kind of nudge people in the right direction regardless of their religion.
 
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Jane_the_Bane

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The shortest possible answer: I don't.

Let me elaborate:
I see "keeping the faith" as a kind of inoculation against cognitive dissonance, a deliberate ward against noticing the discrepancy between reality and one's beliefs.
There are plenty of world views and ideologies that encourage, promote, cultivate, and glorify such a starry-eyed fanatism - and I consider it a red flag.
 
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FireDragon76

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The shortest possible answer: I don't.

Let me elaborate:
I see "keeping the faith" as a kind of inoculation against cognitive dissonance, a deliberate ward against noticing the discrepancy between reality and one's beliefs.
There are plenty of world views and ideologies that encourage, promote, cultivate, and glorify such a starry-eyed fanatism - and I consider it a red flag.

I don't think faith needs to be understood in those terms. Like @ananda pointed out, it's possible to simply see faith as "confidence". It would even potentially be consistent with some forms of Christianity.

Faith isn't necessarily fundamental to a religion in the same terms as it is in many Protestant denominations. Even in Judaism or Islam, faith doesn't have the same emphasis. Most religions define themselves in terms of their practices, not their faith.
 
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Rajni

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Right now, the only faith I really have is faith that, as Julian of
Norwich said, "All shall be well … and all manner of thing shall be well."
I keep that faith by reminding myself that Love is the foundation of all.

And there are enough instances of signs, symbols, and synchronicity
scattered along my path to help me stay the course, as new revelations
roll in -- nothing world-changing on a global scale, simply things custom-
designed (by God and perhaps a spiritual guide or two) to help me
just grow the heck up, already. :laughing::blueheart:

Beyond that, eh... who knows...
idon_t10.gif
 
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Jane_the_Bane

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Well, I do have that kind of faith - but it would never lend itself to sustaining adherence to a specific religious world view like the OP asked ("1 billion muslims who are pretty sure of their faith").
I've seen plenty of "the Qur'an and Hadiths say this, therefore it's true - so game over, secular science"- arguments.
 
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Jane_the_Bane

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Doctrinal certainty is not a stand-alone trait of (certain branches of) Christianity, nor has it got anything to do with the "Holy Spirit".
Scientologists have got plenty of that, as do Mormons and other people who follow ideologies that most of us will probably be able to tag as spurious and, well, simply not descriptive of reality as we understand it.
There's plenty of faith to be witnessed in a Flat Earth congress, at the "Creation Museum", or among adherents of homeopathy.
 
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FireDragon76

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Doctrinal certainty is not a stand-alone trait of (certain branches of) Christianity, nor has it got anything to do with the "Holy Spirit".
Scientologists have got plenty of that, as do Mormons and other people who follow ideologies that most of us will probably be able to tag as spurious and, well, simply not descriptive of reality as we understand it.
There's plenty of faith to be witnessed in a Flat Earth congress, at the "Creation Museum", or among adherents of homeopathy.

I think the problem is that the Rationalist Revolution of the Middle Ages that effected the entire western world. We've made religion and ethics highly cognitive exercises ("faith = thinking" is so common in Evangelicalism, for instance), when in reality its often simply an elaborate rationalization for the evils that people tend to do to each other. Racism, genocide, economic and gender exploitation can all be justified in the name of upholding the rationality of a religious "worldview".
 
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dlamberth

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I think the problem is that the Rationalist Revolution of the Middle Ages that effected the entire western world. We've made religion and ethics highly cognitive exercises ("faith = thinking" is so common in Evangelicalism, for instance), when in reality its often simply an elaborate rationalization for the evils that people tend to do to each other. Racism, genocide, economic and gender exploitation can all be justified in the name of upholding the rationality of a religious "worldview".
I've come to believe that the introduction of writing has been a huge contributor to the the Rational way of thinking. In most of the 200,000 plus years of Human existence, Faith was a subjective experience, almost entirely focused with Nature in some form. We can see a bit of the Subjective experience in the few Indigenous cultures that are still hanging on. But when writing came along, Faith changed from Nature to Letters. From Subjective to Rationalist. From being Alive to a focus on Dogma. From One with Nature and Life to One with Words and Logic.
 
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FireDragon76

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I've come to believe that the introduction of writing has been a huge contributor to the the Rational way of thinking. In most of the 200,000 plus years of Human existence, Faith was a subjective experience, almost entirely focused with Nature in some form. We can see a bit of the Subjective experience in the few Indigenous cultures that are still hanging on. But when writing came along, Faith changed from Nature to Letters. From Subjective to Rationalist. From being Alive to a focus on Dogma. From One with Nature and Life to One with Words and Logic.

No, I would say it started with Socrates. Socrates started the western tradition of consideration of philosophy in the abstract. Writing in itself did not cause that- in fact Socrates himself had disdain for writing. In the Middle Ages a powerful religious organization (Rome) basically made reason, as defined by them, the measure of all things.
 
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dlamberth

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No, I would say it started with Socrates. Socrates started the western tradition of consideration of philosophy in the abstract. Writing in itself did not cause that- in fact Socrates himself had disdain for writing. In the Middle Ages a powerful religious organization (Rome) basically made reason, as defined by them, the measure of all things.
I'm not claiming that writing in of itself brought about Rational thought. But that it's development had a major effect on the way Faith in the West changed from Subjective Faith to Rational Faith.

So for instance, the expanding range of Socrates convictions would not be possible with out writing because it's only when pinned to paper did his thoughts become fixed and examined and widely adopted independent of the speaker. That, and the Greek alphabet had effectively severed all ties to the Subjective world.

The Religious organizations in the Middle-Ages were by that time firmly locked into Words they read from their Sacred Text. They no longer were opened to the Subjective Experience that had been a part of the Human Experience for the previous 200,000 plus years.
 
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FireDragon76

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I'm not claiming that writing in of itself brought about Rational thought. But that it's development had a major effect on the way Faith in the West changed from Subjective Faith to Rational Faith.

So for instance, the expanding range of Socrates convictions would not be possible with out writing because it's only when pinned to paper did his thoughts become fixed and examined and widely adopted independent of the speaker. That, and the Greek alphabet had effectively severed all ties to the Subjective world.

The Religious organizations in the Middle-Ages were by that time firmly locked into Words they read from their Sacred Text. They no longer were opened to the Subjective Experience that had been a part of the Human Experience for the previous 200,000 plus years.

I think that's a vastly oversimplified view of the issue.
 
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Silmarien

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No, I would say it started with Socrates. Socrates started the western tradition of consideration of philosophy in the abstract. Writing in itself did not cause that- in fact Socrates himself had disdain for writing. In the Middle Ages a powerful religious organization (Rome) basically made reason, as defined by them, the measure of all things.

This is not actually true. You can easily go back to Pythagoras and Parmenides to find abstract Greek philosophy, and even some of the Sophists (Gorgias comes to mind) were wildly abstract with their thinking. This is a tradition that stretches well back into Pre-Socratic philosophy.

As for Socrates himself, given that our picture of him is based largely upon the character that appears in Plato's dialogues, I wouldn't really credit him with much besides being one of a number of influences upon Plato. And for the lasting image that comes with martyrdom, but it was Plato whose ideas we have genuine access to, and Plato who founded the Academy and really cemented the abstract tradition. You might even be able to argue that writing played a significant role, given that he was as much a writer as a philosopher.

I don't think it's correct to characterize even someone like Plato as a hard rationalist, though. The hard logical rationalism that we see come out of Catholic scholasticism is more Aristotelian in character. (Mind you, Aristotle is also where we start seeing ethical defenses of slavery and misogyny based in natural law. He's where that sort of systematization really starts, for better or for worse.)
 
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dlamberth

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I think that's a vastly oversimplified view of the issue.
I understand. But when looking at how the ancients approached life before writing hit the scene with their subjective outlook of Nature and how that all changed with the advent of writing, which than codified rational thought into a type of dogma, I don't think it's at all oversimplified. I see the same happening to the Bible or the Quran, and the type of Faith generated there where the words are completely codified into dogma. Which is way different than the kind of Faith generated by the Oral traditions of Indigenous cultures.
 
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cloudyday2

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I understand. But when looking at how the ancients approached life before writing hit the scene with their subjective outlook of Nature and how that all changed with the advent of writing, which than codified rational thought into a type of dogma, I don't think it's at all oversimplified. I see the same happening to the Bible or the Quran, and the type of Faith generated there where the words are completely codified into dogma. Which is way different than the kind of Faith generated by the Oral traditions of Indigenous cultures.
Back from my college days, I remember that computation and parsing of a language are equivalent. As I recall, Nietzsche suggested that we can never truly vanguish religion as long as the word "God" exists in our language(?) (Probably @Silmarien can correct my recollection if I garbled it which isn't too uncommon.)

Similar to what you are saying, I suspect that any religion that WRITES their religious beliefs and doesn't also provide a rich capability to radically reinterpret those writings in new ways to meet new circumstances is doomed. Sects that take a religious text literally have power in the short-term, but in the long-term they cannot evolve and must become extinct eventually (IMO). Judaism has survived, because although they have a sacred text, they also have ways of understanding that text that allow for flexibility.
 
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Silmarien

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Back from my college days, I remember that computation and parsing of a language are equivalent. As I recall, Nietzsche suggested that we can never truly vanguish religion as long as the word "God" exists in our language(?) (Probably @Silmarien can correct my recollection if I garbled it which isn't too uncommon.)

Hmm. I don't recall the exact quote, but I did find it here. Mind you, the article itself is not great--there is some ambiguous quoting in it than can give the impression that Nietzsche was a fanatic of the Enlightenment who thought that science could provide a source of morality and value, which is... off base, to put it mildly.

Nietzsche was definitely very aware of the ways in which religion conditions culture--Christian ideas about morality have certainly survived the collapse of Christianity, though Nietzsche foresaw them eventually fading away. (That is what he really meant by the Death of God--he preferred a Hellenistic approach to morality as a celebration of strength rather than the Christian focus on sacrificial love for the neighbor.)

Nietzsche is great. I have some pretty profound disagreements with him, but I think he gets a lot of stuff right too, and even his errors are insightful.

Similar to what you are saying, I suspect that any religion that WRITES their religious beliefs and doesn't also provide a rich capability to radically reinterpret those writings in new ways to meet new circumstances is doomed. Sects that take a religious text literally have power in the short-term, but in the long-term they cannot evolve and must become extinct eventually (IMO). Judaism has survived, because although they have a sacred text, they also have ways of understanding that text that allow for flexibility.

I don't think this is true. Islam, for example, is quite strict--its alleged revelation is so specific to a certain culture that you're not even supposed to recite the Qur'an except in Arabic. Its divinely mandated legal code is almost uniquely resistant to evolution, but it has certainly managed to survive and thrive for almost 1400 years. I am not convinced that it's compatible with a secular world, but theocracies don't have to be.

Of course, even a rigidly formulated religion like Islam can't prevent people like the Sufi mystics from radically reinterpreting certain aspects of it, or secular Muslims from doing the same. A religion doesn't need to provide a means for doing this--if someone wants to be a Christian Gnostic, good luck stopping them.
 
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