I get that Doomed Soul, but that is not how it worked in other forums.  You highlighted what you wanted to go inside the box and then you clicked on the quote button. 

.... /sigh ... think outside the box...

Be aware that the # of [Qu.otes] must match the # of [/Qu.otes]  , every beginning has an end, so to speak... or else you end up putting words in poor Thomathy's mouth >.> again

Thomathy, thanks again for helping me.  I think I'm getting the knack.  If I make a mistake I know you won't ridicule me.

Hi Rising Sun. I posted a link explaining the quote function in the other thread. Here it is again.

OH MY GOD!  Please Embed Long Links Like This!  -HD

About your question, I could probably dream up some crazy scenario where you get saved by almost anything, so yes, faith can save you in an emergency.

Thanks butterbattle, I will check it out next time I come online.  I believe faith can save a person only if he takes action.  Faith in one's abilitity to survive could motivate a person to do what he needs to do to survive.  But to survive, and call it the hand of god is true only in the sense that everything that happens in life is the hand of god, that is, if you believe in determinism.  No one gets special treatment by some personal god who is looking out for them.  That's my opinion, of course.

Wow it's been forever since I've seen that.

Still good. That song is going to be popping back up in my head though now for the next week or so.

To me, there is something lost with the idea that we are only chemical replications of existing material.  Of course, it might be my emotions playing a part in denouncing this idea, but this does not, by itself, make my ideas wrong.  The truth is that maybe I am defending my right to see the world through a different lens; one that may not be scientific in your view, for not providing enough evidence, but not to be discarded either if you include reason as part of the scientific process. 

But i find it quite depressing to believe that we are the product of a god that only desires our worship (as so many gods and goddess desire our worship). Intern the natural explanation gives us such wonder about the us, the world and the universe, that it far supercedes any religious idea of our creation (which is practically always to worship some egomanical god). I mean you are the product of existing material, your fathers sperm (his DNA) and your mothers egg (her DNA) which combine made you. Yet you are not exactly half you mother or half your father per se you are your own person as well, with seperate desires and needs than those of your mother and father. It's actualy quite amazing.

Whose us? Natural explanation of the mechanics of the universe gives who "such awe" and wonder?

This sort of dribble is by far one of the reason i find atheist to be a pathetic joke, disconnected from the world around them. Your "awe" and "wonder" is sort of like a taste preference, you may really enjoy the taste of shit, the rest of us have decided to pass. 

Stop trying to pass off your ugly ass wife as the most beautiful women in the world. 

a taste preference?  At least the bloody universe objectively exists.

It was in reference to the awe and wonder he was peddling of the natural explanations of the universe, not his literal wife.

So remind my again MoMN: you believe in completely unfounded superstitions because atheists also believe certain things without evidence?

You: "Atheists have faith too!"

Me: "So...?"

Me: "Though I can't ultimately prove it, I hope that one day everyone in the world will be well educated and safe, thus making them very resistant to superstition. Apart from hoping, I also see in history, current social statistics, and my own personal experience, that such an outcome is not at all unlikely"

You: "Though I can't ultimately prove it, I believe that it is a fact of the universe that a man was born of a virgin and later rose from the dead and/or that I will live for eternity and/or I will be reincarnated and/or a man met the Arch Angel Gabriel and wrote down God's law, as dictated by said angel, and later flew on a winged horse to heaven. I choose to believe some of these claims while discarding the rest as obvious superstitions."

How is it that yours and my position are equally valid?

And furthermore, if you insist they are equally valid, how is that an argument for choosing your position over mine? They are equally valid remember?

To Rising Sun

I think the heart of your question is in thinking of Holocaust survivors. Did their superstitious faith help them? Possibly, but if so how?

By strenghening their immune system through positive thinking?

If so, it isn't really their faith that's helping them, it's positive thinking, which of course could just as easily come about by thinking about seeing their family again.

If a group of dyed-in-the-wool atheists were rounded up in a concentration camp, do you think fewer of them would survive than a group of people who had some form of superstitious faith?

Or do you think that some would die and some would live, the ones surviving being a mixture of people in good physical condition, some that were just lucky, and some through shear force of will, spurred on in part by faith in a better tomorrow/faith in a love of their family/faith in the rightiousness of their cause, and the wrongfulness of their captors?

If faith sometimes saves people in crisis then that is only relevant of lack of faith means a higher likelyhood of dying in a crisis.

Otherwise it simply means that sometimes, when people survive crisis, a strong willpower, spurred on by an arbitrary conviction, superstitious or otherwise, is part of the reason for them surviving.

So your question is only relevant if you are prepered to believe that being atheistic makes you inherently more vulnerable as a person.

Judging from your comments you don't seem to be the kind of person who would make such a judgement, but if you are then you need to back that up with hard evidence, because I hope you can see how potentially offensive the implications of your question could be.

You seem like a friendly and openminded person so I don't think you really want to make that judgement. I think what you are really interested in is the question you posed later about, if faith has at some point saved somebody, like say a holocaust surviver, then is that faith bad?

To which my answer is: of course not. Faith is never bad in and of itself. It is only when faith leads you to make bad decisions that it becomes bad.

Let me give you an example from my own life, and one I think most people, atheist and theist alike can relate to.

A few years ago now I met a girl that I fell in love with and she with me, and we were in a nice, and very young relationship.

At the hight of passion I had faith that she and I were gonna last for ever, that we were perfectly capable of making it work, so to speak.

That is, I had faith in this, because I had no real evidence to support that notion, since our relationship was only six months in, but I still believed it.

So there you have it: I had faith because I had no evidence at all about the potential futures of our relationship, and yet I still believed in one specific outcome.

Mind you there was no evidence to suggest it wasn't gonna last either, so my faith was completely harmless at this point, and certainly served to make me happy at the time.

So a completely harmless, and indeed positive faith, that made me happy.

But of course the blissful young love didn't last forever, and the evidence soon started mounting up that she and I were probably gonna have a hard time making it work in the long term. She was alot younger than I was, and we were at very different stages at our lives, ultimately wanting different things, and this started manifesting itself in all sorts of ways. Her behavior changed, my behavior changed, our talks about the future changed, my friends and family started expressing doubts about the stability of our relationship and so on.

That is, I still had faith that we could, and would make it last, but now there was mounting evidence that that was not the case.

So now my faith was no longer harmless, because I was pained by the mounting evidence against it. I didn't let go of it, mind! I simply became more and more frustrated with the difficulty of holding on to it in the face of more and more evidence against it. I have finally let go of course, and that is a burden lifted from my shoulders, but it took me alot longer than the time it took for sufficient evidence against me to accumilate.

So as you can hear, it is certainly possible to have a faith that is in no way impeeding to your life, but it can quickly turn painful when the evidence against it starts showing up.

Had I been right about us, I wouldn't have suffered the pain of having an unfounded belief challenged of course.

But then, if we really had stayed together, the initial faith I had, would still have disappeared over time in the face of the positive evidence that we really were making it work, as I had originally assumed on no evidence.

If she had moved in with me, if we'd gotten engaged, had children, all the while affirming our love for eachother regularly, all of this would be evidence in favor of the two of us having what it takes to make it work and then it wouldn't be faith I had, but rather a reasonable assumption based on the accumilated evidence.

So that analogy has the following relation to religious faith:

It is certainly possible to hold a belief with no evidence that is not harmful to you in anyway, and may even bring you comfort and joy, like my belief in my relationship while it was still young and passionate.

But if there is mounting evidence that your faith is wrong, then it brings you internal discomfort and grief as you cling to it, and you are better off letting it go, because it really is unfounded, and always has been: that's the definition of faith after all: belief without evidence. So while it may not cause you harm while it is unchallenged, as soon as you begin to discover counter-evidence it will plunge you deeper and deeper into confussion and frustration.

And that's just the internal grief, never mind all the bad things an unfounded belief might bring you to do to others.

It is my oppinion that any faith worth holding on to doesn't stay a faith forever. Like I said about if me and my ex had stayed together I would have slowly gone from unfounded belief to reasonable belief as the evidence of a stable relationship would manifest itself over time.

Faith in superstitious claims necessarily only have one way to go, and that's down. That's why I oppose them: because I think it is unhealthy to remain faithful in any one thing for a lifetime. You either go from unfounded faith to evidence-based expection over time, or you let go of the unfounded faith, for your own sake as much as anyone elses.