How important is faith to the human psyche?

I find this part ” It doesn’t matter if it is true or not, what matters is that you have something to believe in.” to be particularly ridiculous, actually. That’s not what matters, truth does.

Putting complete faith in anything other than your own abilities is not always a wise investment with a lousy return policy.

It’s funny how speeches always seem so great and uplifting, even if they are spewing crap lol. It does matter what you have faith in and believe in. I could say I have faith that humans will learn to be more tolerant of diversity in the future, but having faith that some guy will come back to save the people that believe in him seems kind of counter productive.

@Cruiser I was trying to think of a good reply, you hit it out of the park.

If you’ve ever questioned beliefs that you hold you’re not alone
But you oughtta realize that every myth is a metaphor
In the case of Christianity
and Judaism there exists the belief
that spiritual matters are enslaved to history

The Buddhists believe that the functional aspects override the myth
While other religions use the literal core to build foundations with
See half the world sees the myth as fact
and it’s seen as a lie by the other half and
the simple truth is that it’s none of that ‘cause
somehow no matter what the world keeps turning
Somehow we get by without ever learning

Somehow no matter what the world keeps turning
Somehow we get by without ever learning
Somehow no matter what the world keeps turning
Somehow we get by without ever learning

Science and religion
are not mutually exclusive
In fact for better understanding
we take the facts of science and apply them
And if both factors keep evolving
then we continue getting information
But closing off possibilities
makes it hard to see the bigger picture
Consider the case of the woman
whose faith helped her make it through
when she was raped and cut up left for dead
in a trunk her beliefs held true

It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not
‘cause some things are better left without a doubt and
and if it works then it gets the job done
Somehow no matter what the world keeps turning
Somehow we get by without ever learning

Somehow no matter what the world keeps turning
Somehow we get by without ever learning
Somehow no matter what the world keeps turning
Somehow we get by without ever learning
Somehow no matter what the world keeps turning
Somehow we get by without ever learning
Somehow no matter what the world keeps turning
Somehow we get by without ever learning

- Screeching Weasel, The Science of Myth

I have always had faith in my guardian angels. If this were not true, I would not be here today.

Thank you my guardian angels.

@Seelix Very very nice.

I don’t think faith is all that important. I tend to think of faith as a rather primitive thought pattern. Just as pre-scientific cultures invented gods to explain why things happened, they used faith to reinforce their belief systems. The shaman said that the rains stopped because the gods were angry with the people; the people believed it, because they had no better explanation, and this fulfilled the human drive to find out and explain things.

As science explains more and more of what past cultures attributed to gods, faith becomes less and less applicable. It is a comforting behavior, and it is an easy behavior, but while it is a natural part of the human psyche, it isn’t a necessary one.

This is a tricky question for me, because I see every waking moment as an act of faith.

I have faith that the air I breathe and the food I eat will sustain me and not kill me. I have faith that the heart beating in my chest will continue to do so.

Perhaps more importantly, I have faith that the people I meet will reach out in honesty and understanding. This is not always so, but it is true more often than not. Still, I have faith that people are good.

I have faith in Spirit that this is all here for a reason, but then I’m a New Age practitioner who has seen more than his share of unexplainable phenomenon.

It’s just my opinion, but I think faith is important. When I plant and water a seed, I have faith it will grow.

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle. ~ Albert Einstein

There’s a difference between believing in something you know is not true and believing in something that may not be true, but may not be false either. For example, I’m not going to have faith that the world is flat when we know it is not. I see no point in that. And I am not going to have faith in something that seems untrue to me, even if we are not 100% sure if it is true or not. But I may have faith that one day, for example, the world will be much more accepting of homosexuality and that eventually gay marriage will be legal in most places. Do some people think that will never happen? Yes. Does anyone know if it will never happen? No. I don’t see why I can’t have faith that it will.

Additionally, believing in things like “love conquers all” (something that may or may not be true, or may depend on circumstances) can, in my opinion, positively affect people’s behavior so that it may end up being true, as corny as that sounds. Believing that something positive will happen, even when you are not sure if it will, can certainly have a placebo-like effect that may help that positive outcome to occur. There’s a fine line between faith and foolishness, but there’s a line. And the trick is discovering where it lies.

I’m kind of a fan of the Tyler Durden school of thought.

Excerpts from “This is Your Life” by The Dust Brothers from the Fight Club soundtrack:

Only after disaster can we be resurrected
It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything
Nothing is static, everything is appaling, everything is falling apart

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake
You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else
We are all part of the same compost heap
We are the all singing, all dancing, crap of the world

You are not your bank account
You are not the clothes you wear
You are not the contents of your wallet
You are not your bowel cancer
You are not your grande latte
You are not the car you drive
You are not your fucking khaki’s

You have to give up, you have to give up
You have to realize that someday you will die
Until you know that, you are useless

I say let me never be complete
I say may I never be content
I say deliver me from Swedish furniture
I say deliver me from clever arts
I say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth
I say you have to give up
I say evolve, and let the chips fall where they may

This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time

I think faith is pretty dysfunctional. It encourages people not just to look past evidence, but it also invites them to look past intuition into the arena of random causality. I don’t see how that helps us. We may be desperate for explanations, and we may jump on the first semi-plausible explanation that comes along. But that does not mean we should take leave of our senses.

Intuition is better than that. At least with intuition, your mind is using subconscious (but logical) processes to make a guess about how to explain things.

Random faith—that is belief in explanations without a shred of supporting evidence—seems pretty foolish. People will come up with all kinds of stories based on these ideas and they will build entire cities out of cards based on one solid point. Doesn’t make it so.

The word “faith” has all kinds of different meanings, as this question shows. Does it just mean “belief”? Then yes, humans do really need to believe things, as beliefs motivate our actions. In this case it is preferable if the things we believe happen to be true.

Does faith mean “hope”? I’d say hope is pretty important as well, though it should be tempered by reality.

Does faith mean “belief without evidence or reason”? I think this kind of faith is stupid, dangerous, and not necessary whatsoever.

The line looks like mindless blather to me. Any time says you have certain criteria to meet, but they’re so general that it doesn’t matter how you meet them, it says nothing. It probably suggests the speaker is spreading propaganda.

Like: oh, you need to believe in something, EVEN IF IT’S NATIONAL SOCIALISM! Just don’t be a nihilist! (Hopefully somebody got the reference….)

Faith is absolutely fundamental. It’s at least an important invention to calm the mind at its boundaries with our other experience. It allows the mind to go along with the potential dissonance of constructs like religions. And under every bit of science way down at the foundation are some unprovable premises and unanswered questions. It lets us go on with our think-think figure-figure business with what we do “know” as we know it. It’s ok to be hand-wavy a little when the results are as beneficial as they are.

Life is full of trials and faith helps us get through those tough moments. Especially the belief that things will always work out.

@dabbler, I would hesitate to characterize my belief in mathematical and scientific axioms (i.e. the shortest distance between two points on a flat plane is a line) as “faith.” But cie la vie.

“la vie”

“c’est”

I usually don’t even try. I just write “say la vee”

The French are a bunch of hippie communist cowards anyway. Freedom fries!

So… a Frenchman walks into a bar in Texas and a guy sits down next to him and orders some calf fries. He asks what calf fries are and the guy explains that they are fried bull testicles. A few minutes later a guy sits down on the other side of him and orders french fries. The Frenchman promptly got up and left!

Empirical evidence shows that it’s one factor contributing to our well-being.

I’d be curious to see how it might vary by personality type. Religious faith is rather pointless, as far as I’m personally concerned, but there are plenty of people who are emotionally stabilized by it – to the point where they perhaps cannot even function without it.