This is for the all people, whether they are religous or not. It would be a sightly different question for the atheists/agnostics

For religous people?
Why do you believe in your God or gods (remember, some faith are different)? Were you brought up with it, and do you agree with its principles and current direction? Or do you just believe as a habit?

For atheists/agnostics
Why don't believe in your God? Were you brought up with it, and do you agree with its principles and current direction? Or do you just believe as a habit?

Its a interesting question on faith, and why we have it and I wanted to see why this community believes what they believe in.

Why don't you believe in your God???

Ok, if they are athiest/agnostic they don't have a god. You mean to say, why don't you believe in the gods others keep talking about.

As for agreeing with its principles and current direction, this doesn't really make much sense. I will assume you mean to ask, "do we like the path we are on?"

And since neither has belief in the sense you are implying, I will assume the third question was a copy/paste error.

As for myself, I would qualify as an athiest. More specifically, while I think there is no god, I also think that if there were, we wouldn't really understand it. In fact, we wouldn't understand it to the point that there might as well not be one.

Beyond that, I am buddhist. I was not raised this way, but instead found it on my own. I came upon buddhist philosophy almost as an accident, found it interesting, and began studying. After a few years of on and off hobbyist studying, I felt I knew enough to have some clue what I was dealing with. In addition, I was impressed and moved by the philosophy and understanding expressed in the tradition.

Still, while I am a member of a religion, I do not consider myself religious. There has long been a debate about whether or not buddhism is a philosophy or a religion. In truth, its both, but for me it is a particularly practical philosophy.

Yes it probably is.

What I am basically saying is that why do you believe what you believe in?

Well, thats a long answer. I wrote up the beginning on my LJ. http://www.livejournal.com/users/majesticfrog/

There is a lot more though, but that is a good start. I am interested in comments.

Hmmph... When I read the title I thought this was really about faith, not just a restatement of the all the other posts asking about religion.

Well I will respond by saying what I find so interesting about the word "faith." But in order to be true to the original post I will also tie it in to whether I believe in God and answer some of the questions in that first post.

Well the use of the word "faith" that interests me most is the role that it plays in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). When we ask how it is that we know things, faith is one of the answers and despite the silliness of scoffers it is an important one. Speaking as a physicist, for example, I will firmly say that faith plays a vital role in the process of discovery in physics.

Before I go on I wish to quote a favorite science fiction book of mine called "Tactics of Mistake", by Gordon R. Dickson. "by and large, philosophers are ruthless people. ...The immediate teachings of philosophers may be gentle, but the theory behind their teaching is without compunction" I quote this because I wish to make the point that people who think in terms of rationality and ideals and are obsessed with impartial judgement without sentimentality often railroad the perception of life in a ruthless manner without giving due notice to the perfectly valid experiences of human beings as they live their lives. I do not wish to say that in doing philosophy my way that I can avoid being just as ruthless as the character in Dickson's book accuses all philosphers, but I do say that in being aware of our ruthless tendencies we can try to compensate by giving due notice to data which is often exlcuded in order to improve upon our impartiality.

Now getting on with the topic of faith, consider an everyday use of the word faith in the following dialog.

"He will come back." says the first voice.
"How do you know it?" asks the second voice.
"I have faith in him." the first voice replies.

In this dialog, faith is put forward as a source of knowledge. Now the scoffer will say that this person has no knowledge at all but only wishful thinking. But I think we all live our lives with the same kind of faith everyday, and without it we cannot live. We drive our cars, with faith that we will arrive without dying the way. We work at our jobs with faith that we will be paid. This is pretty much a neverending list. The scoffers think faith is self delustion and a crutch that is needed only by the weak of mind, for the only real knowledge requires proof. I say it is scoffers who are handicapped by their need for proof. I say that their need for certainty is a worse crutch. I say that the expectation of proof is the greatest delusion of them all.

Proof is the bread and butter of mathematics, but you cannot get anywhere without axioms which you accept on faith, without any proof at all. In physics we take a theory on faith until we find contrary evidence, so that we can revise our theory and raise up a new object of faith. And then there is the most important of human concerns, love, which cannot exist without faith. There is no proof that will ever reveal the contents of another person's mind or feelings. The only possible knowldege of love must be given by faith. And there is no proof of your own love for someone else that will distinguish it from infatuation or desire. Love is a leap of faith.

Necessity of faith derives quite directly from the inaccessibility of proof and the fact that if we chase the illusion of proof our life and endeavors come to a standstill. Faith is indispensible because it conditions our responses to the events of our lives. It is part of the filter of our perceptions, for as any good psychologist knows, our seeing and hearing happens in our mind not our senses. And a good faith helps us to find the reactions to life that are the most helpful in living our lives in a fruitful manner. Of course what is fruitful or helpful to our own lives is something that we can only judge for ourselves.

Of course some may say that this is only an excuse to continue in ignorance happy with our delusions, for it is often the case with children especially, that what they want and what they need are often at odds. Christians might say that this is why salvation requires an act of God. Well I find another philosophy which fits quite neatly into place here called pragmatism or "pragmaticism" by Charles Sanders Pierce, which suggest that the ultimate source of knowledge is to make a trial of it and see if it works. In this theory of epistemology, the effect of believing in something is part of its truth value. In this way our life is our own personal experiment to run as best we can and so to find our own best answer to the question of truth.

One common problem with the word faith as with many words including science and God, is that there are people who try to take private ownership of them, delegating to the themselves the ultimate authority on what these words mean. It is nothing more than an infantile attempt to squash troubling questions and challenges to their beliefs, as part of their own addiction to certainty.

Now to keep my promise, in answering some of the questions of the starting post.

My own deepest faith is this, "that life is worth living." An elaboration of that faith that I often give is in the statement that "every experience in life is a gift." The inspiration for this faith may surprise you, for it came to me from a book by the so called existentialist Albert Camus, called "The Stranger." Now for me this faith leads directly to God as the author of these gifts. In fact I often say that the statement "that life is worth living" is equalent in my mind and personality to the statement "I believe in God." For this equivalence is my ultimate source for a definition of the word God, that is meaninful to me. I personaly find any question of whether a thing exists or not to be a meaningless one. To ask a question about something you must have the object at hand or a word for it, and in either case the relevant question is not whether it exists but what is it. Questions about whether God exist are silly. We would be much more to the point if we simply explained what the word means to us. And if it doesn't mean anything to you, then talking about it is more about poking into other peoples business than any thing else.

As for my family influence. I asked my father once if he believed in God and he replied that he was an agnostic, and I took from his explanation that this meant he did not know. As a result, I dedicated myself to finding out the answer on my own.

This post has been edited by mitchellmckain: Nov 27 2006, 08:17 PM

If I were to go through life and not believe in God what would be the purpose of my life? Would my purpose be to simply live a good life and then die? At first, I believed in God because of tradition, I grew up in a Seventh-Day-Adventist family (for those of you who don't know Seventh-Day-Adventists are a Christian based faith that believes that Saturday is the true Sabbath day and therefore worship on that day. We also believe that Ellen White was a profit and that her words were God-given). During the last few years, I have pondered this same question very intently. Why should I believe in God? I would have to say that the Bible is a big reason that I believe in God. There is an old saying that says if you want to tell whether something is true or false that the test of time is the only true way to find out. I believe this holds true for the Bible also. If the Bible was some great hoax in history than it would have been discovered by now and discredited but it hasn't been. Besides that I guess that there is too much design and grace in nature to not believe in God. The Big Bang Theory (which could be an entire other subject) is a very chaotic theory, a bunch of mass slamming into each oher by chance and creating all that we see now. Nature portrays too much organization and design to be all by chance.
I will also give you a scenario. There are two men that go throughout life, the Christian and the Athiast. The Christian lives a good life and continually spreads God's word and has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The Athiast lives a life without morals. He steals, he cheats, all while thinking nothing of it. They both die and years later Christ returns. The Christian goes on to live eternally and the Athiast does not. Now take the same scenario except this time there is no God and Christ does not return. The Christian still lived a good life and enjoyed life while the athiast lived a poor life without morals. It seems like a win win situation to be a Christian. Now, please don't take me wrong. I'm not saying that all Athiasts are moralless people. I know plenty of Athiasts that are good people but I still wish that they knew God like I do.
I hope this answers your intro questions somewhat.

There was a philosopher who argued that point, but I've forgotten the guys name. Unfortunely, when you add the 100s of other religions, thats becomes harder.

Hmm, in my opinion faith is a good thing. Cause it puts us in the right direction. It prevents us from doing bad things, and that's if you're a moral and an educated person.

I don't get atheist people. I know this guy who is an atheist. One time we were at the party and i told him to get with this chick who was drunk (i was just joking at the time). N he told me that that was just a sinful thing. I don't get that at all. I mean if you don't have faith or anything then why would you care about what's right and what's wrong. Faith is the one that tells us what's sinful and whats not, so why would he care if he doesn't have faith???

Faith does'nt tell you what is right and wrong. There are extensive systems of ethics and morality that will tell you what is right and wrong, and only a few of them need to invoke faith (those that are religious systems). The word sin, which means something that separates a person from god, has slowly come to mean "that which is wrong" for many people, and has become somewhat seperate from its original religious meaning.

I am an athiest, as in, I do not believe in a god or gods. However, I do consider some things to be morally acceptable, and other things to be morally inacceptable. This does not require "faith" (at least as most people use it in this context. Fath can have many meanings).

The simplest, non-faith way of looking at morality is a simple thought exercise: would I want a different person to do X to me, where X is the behavior currently being considered. If not, then it makes sense to not do X. This creates a social contract where everyone, not wanting X to happen to them, declines to do X to anyone else.

Really, an aweful lot of moral situations can be resolved using this rule.

atheists have as much faith as others do...
atheists believe and have faith that there is no god