I think God-believers have a love-hate relationship with faith. When I tell them faith cannot help decide what is true and what is false, some insist that everyone uses faith every day. They might tell me, for example, I use faith every time I sit on a chair. They could not be more wrong.

When I sit on a chair, I don't know, or believe, it won't collapse. But I have enough experience of sitting on chairs to have high confidence that they usually bear my weight. I do not believe they ALL will, nor do I believe the chair I'm about to sit on will be safe--I simply take a chance every time I sit down and I know that every now and again, a chair WILL collapse.

The theist uses faith to believe God does exist, not that God MIGHT exist. Worse still, I have incontrovertible evidence that almost all chairs I sit on bear my weight, theists have no evidence at all that their gods exist. They just have faith.

But I wonder why theists seek to imply that everyone, including atheists, use faith? It can't be because they think faith is a reliable way of working out what is true--they are not out to congratulate atheists for being smart!

I can only conclude theists recognise that faith is worthless nonsense, and wish to excuse themselves on the grounds that we all rely on worthless nonsense, so they are no worse than we are!

Some theists go even further. They say atheists have MORE faith than theists; theists sometimes say they don't have enough faith to be an atheist. Of course, this is fully absurd. You need no faith at all to be an atheist. Listen to the reasons theists give for believing their gods exist. If you find their reasons are bad, you won't believe in their gods. You will be an atheist, and it took no faith whatsoever.

But this is the odd thing, if faith is a good thing, then it must be better to have more faith rather than less! Of course, theists do not use this argument to complement atheists. They use it to disparage them but, in so doing, they implicitly admit that believing things on faith is very stupid.

Well, I agree. It is.

- Bill Flavell

ask your father

Nice!

It really is a lovehate relationship

whether or not someone has faith in something has very little to do with the truth, and it is my intention to believe only things which are first true, and not to first believe them and then try to wish them into being true.