We should "sacrifice what may be in your personal interest for... ...what preserves the social order"?

Fascism it is, then.

Nah fascism is a particular way of organising the state, there's plenty of ways faith doesn't lead to fascism.

The problem is universality, the idea that the values of a certain group should apply to everyone... and hence everyone can justifiably be held accountable for not adhering to these values, even if they don't believe in them.

Plato... Christianity.

Yeah, well, my inclination is more towards the social order being sorted so as to serve the "personal interests" of the populace.

Suit yourself.

Yeah but the reality is that we are not self-sufficient on our own. We need a group cooperating to sustain ourselves.

If religion or any other common understanding of how to realise this is lacking, then the personal interest of the populace will not be served by default.

Nothing in that proposal implied self-sufficiency; quite the opposite. Interdependence leads to trust and a better quality of life.

But that is hard to explain to 'Mercans.

And off topic.

I'm European. — ChatteringMonkey

Replying her as this is off topic - fair enough. Present circumstances place the point in high relief. I've in mind something along the lines of John Rawls as modified by Martha Nussbaum, adopting a capabilities approach.

I would say you have a shared understanding and values that is functionally similar to religion.

I'm European.

I get it, trust works... until it doesn't.

How do you know that it's unjustified? Like I said earlier, you're more certain than I am. The only suffering here is Abraham's inferred psychological suffering which you seem to be extremely concerned with — BitconnectCarlos

Are you saying Isaac deserved the death penalty for a crime/sin? Otherwise he was innocent and surely suffered, as his father suddenly bound him.

I don't think many writers of this forum would say "give up all reason and follow faith blindly without consideration of custom or common sense!"

So the question is whether faith plays any role in reason, in the life of the mind, and in philosophy

But you're the one looking at the art. See what you will. — Hanover

Speaking of interpreting works to work for you, I recently learned of the 2017 genocide in Myanmar. It was only a little surprising that Buddhist monks were behind it. I was far more appalled that Facebook played an instrumental role, and they were fully aware of what was going on.

How can Buddhist teachings be twisted to justify fucking ethnic cleansing? Rather easily it turns out.



Have faith and see what you're told to see.

Such religious fever happens in all cultures because each religion can't make everyone it touches good. I'm wondering about basic faith as a state in learning though. When mathemticians started doubting parts of Euclid, did that doubt require some kind of intellectual faith in order to go on?

Faith is not opposed to reason. — Fire Ologist

I agree with that if you mean by faith the starting-point of reason. So I wouldn't say that theology is irrational, since it starts from belief in God and attempts work out rational doctrines from there. Even astrology includes a certain rationality. But that makes both doctrines vulberable to rational criticism.

Which is all to say, stop with the literalism. — Hanover

The trouble with these stories is that they hover between the literal and the metaphorical. That's what makes them myths.

These stories were not meant for such analysis. And stop with the sympathy for the characters. They aren't real. — Hanover

If we don't sympathize with the characters, the story becomes pointless.

Topics such as this require that we take great care with the language we use. So even if faith were necessary - and it isn't - that would not make it a virtue; and somethings being justified is not the same as it's being determined. — Banno

I'm not quite sure what you are getting at here. But it is true that I have been neglecting the approval rating that is usually implicit in classifyinng some commitment as a faith. For myself, I am happy to say that whether faith is a virtue depends on what you have faith in and/or what your faith leads you to do. That requires some common basis for assessment. But it doesn't seem too much to say that actions like the ritual murder of one's son, the pointless infliction of suffering on an innocent person, or the wanton destruction of a civilization fall into that category.
There's a group of related words here which it would be good to sort out. Faith, trust, loyalty commitment. All of them have a dark side, which perhaps should have correlated terms. Obsession might be one of them.

So the stories are indeed preposterous, as you say. The lesson one is supposed to take away is, as ↪praxis says, thoughtless obedience. This is not admirable. — Banno

The let-out clauses (Abraham didn't believe God would make him do it, God never intended him to do it) undermine the idea that the take-away is total obedience. But it may be that the point of the story lies completely elsewhere:-

Many Bible scholars have suggested this story's origin was a remembrance of an era when human sacrifice was abolished in favour of animal sacrifice.

If the intended take-away is that God does not require human sacrifice, the story makes sense. The message is reinforced in later books.

Two kings of Judah, Ahaz and Manassah, sacrificed their sons. Ahaz, in 2 Kings 16:3, and King Manasseh in 2 Chronicles 33:6.

Both accounts seriously criticize the action.
See Wikipedia - Human Sacrifice

I can find no way out of believing that the story of Job is outrageous. God inflicts all that suffering on him because of a bet with Satan, to show off how faithful his believers are. Truly, not acceptable. Is it possible that it would have been acceptable in the culture of his time? Even so, not acceptable.
The Flood at least has a comprehensible reason, though it still seems to me to be a gross over-reaction.

I'll venture the notion that faith is about a certain form of trust - a trust in X that can neither be empirically nor logically evidenced. Belief (also closely associated to the notion of trust) can and most always should be justifiable in order to be maintained - as is the case in JTB. But faith eludes this possibility in practice.
Form there, the concept or else experience of faith can then bifurcate into authoritarian doctrines and usages, one the one hand, and on the other into a certain sense of hope-as-acted-upon-conviction regarding what is and will be, one for which one cannot find any steady ground to provide justification for. — javra

That makes sense.

We should "sacrifice what may be in your personal interest for... ...what preserves the social order"?

Fascism it is, then. — Banno

Isn't this Chinese morality?

Nothing in that proposal implied self-sufficiency; quite the opposite. Interdependence leads to trust and a better quality of life.

But that is hard to explain to 'Mercans. — Banno

I think you're overlooking that ideals are pictures of what we want to be rather than what we are. It's the sheep-like culture that idealizes individuality. It's the independent minded people who prize self sacrifice for the community. To understand culture, look for the oppositions and contradictions.

Have faith and see what you're told to see. — praxis

The old trope that faith leads to murder. I'm pretty sure secular nations have gone to war as well. Ukraine looms larger than Myanmar.

I can find no way out of believing that the story of Job is outrageous. God inflicts all that suffering on him because of a bet with Satan, to show off how faithful his believers are. Truly, not acceptable. — Ludwig V

Job is unique in that we can't situate it within any time or place unlike virtually all the other books. I've long considered it thought experiment/theodicy in agreement with some early rabbinic commentators.

Job is needed in canon because it bucks the general biblical trend of associating bad deeds with suffering/misfortune. It's true as a general trend but it's not all inclusive. Without Job the canon would be lacking. The righteous/blameless do suffer and sometimes terribly and without any known reason or justification.

Job also lays out the acceptable limits of suffering - Job questions God, cries out to him, laments the day of his birth, but he never curses God or tells God that he is wrong.

Book of Job also puts humanity in its place epistemically. As humans our perspectives are limited and biased and to draw such broad and universal judgments such as which suffering is ultimately "justified" and which is "unjustified" is beyond us. The book stands against man's hubrism and his tendency of all encompassing judgment. In the end Job is rewarded.

Are you saying Isaac deserved the death penalty for a crime/sin? — Gregory

No. I was only taking issue with Banno's idea that we can clearly know which suffering is justified and which is not.

thoughtless obedience. This is not admirable. — Banno

On a surface reading, the lesson would simply be obedience, like when teaching this story to a child, because a child is thoughtless or incapable of reasoning and knowing what to do. To an adult, the same lesson is trust, capable of reason and knowing what to do, but able to trust someone else's reasons. So obedience is part of the story, but if one concludes it's the only lesson, then much is missed.

Today's first reading at Catholic Mass is about Abraham and Isaac, and, we hundreds of millions hear this:

The Lord God took Abram outside and said,
“Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can.
Just so,” he added, “shall your descendants be.”
Abram put his faith in the LORD,
who credited it to him as an act of righteousness.
- Genesis 15:5-6

This is essential background to the story of Abraham. He had no child at the time and was promised many descendants by God.

Then, later, Abraham and Sara have a child, a child born when thought impossible, but nevertheless a first of many promised descendants.

So next essential thing is that Isaac was most precious to Abraham. He loved him and did everything a good father would, everyday, to keep him safe and raise him. We know Abraham loved Isaac because he was distressed about Ishmael, his other son, and needed to know he would be cared for as well, so of course we know Abraham was a good father and loved his children. Love is essential.

And it is essential that Abraham was sane and rational throughout the story.

Otherwise, without love of his son, or without his mind and reason, the killing of Isaac could not be a sacrifice for Abraham. If Abraham was nuts and somehow didn't know what he was doing, then he wasn't sacrificing a cherished, beloved son; he was acting out some psychosis. That wouldn't be anything other than a tragic accident, and couldn't yield any lesson we can't learn from looking at much other human behavior. Abraham had to love Isaac and know what he was doing for the killing of Isaac to be a sacrifice made by trusting God. And, indeed, a MASSIVE sacrifice.

But despite his love for Isaac, the precious little boy who asked Abraham such a great question on the way to the deed, Abraham stayed faithful to his trust in God, above his own heart.

He found reason to believe God will make good on all of His promises in some other way.

That was the sacrifice - not the act of a madman; not someone blindly obedient - it was a fully informed decision to, despite all else, trust God.

Abraham in his heart trusted God to care for his descendants, even though he could not possibly understand how anymore, since he was killing his single legitimate descendent.

Last, it is essential to the story that God intercedes and saves Isaac.

Abraham showed what obedience and trust and faith are; God showed what obedience, trust and faith in Him are - salvation from death, progeny that number the stars. And Abraham's progeny are the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims at the very least.

Abraham loved Isaac, but trusted God above all else, and because of who God is, Abraham was given Isaac, and the fatherhood of history.

And for further context besides the father of descendents, the Abram/Isaac story is made a part of the Book of Genesis with Adam and Eve. So it shows us God asking himself, why would I ever trust a man again? Why would God bother to talk to any of us. Trust is two-way. God trusted Adam and Eve with the keys to paradise, with one instruction - don't drive faster than 55 miles per hour or you will die - and Adam and Eve decided to trust some snake and try driving 100 miles an hour for themselves - and then they ran and hid from God and needed clothing to stay hidden when God found them, and they blamed the snake and blamed each other for what was their own choice. It was certainly reasonable for God not to trust Abraham's faith, and reasonable to test Abraham, to see if any one of us people could ever be trusted again.

Abraham had reason to trust God - God made Isaac possible in the first place. Luckily, for all of us, Abraham figured out the most rational thing to do in every case, is trust God.

That's the story to me. Not one hint of blind obedience or irrational murderers.

"Obedience" is an adolescent or a slave's word for what a consenting adult does in every act directed towards some purpose. We make our actions ours, using our reasons and willing them, and then enacting our own law accordingly. Call it obedience, or call it enacting your own will - these are the same thing if your will is the will of another. If you trust another, you can say you are obeying another, or just say you are trusting another and take more responsibility for whatever you are doing.

But I need to clarify one last thing. I still do not think faith is opposed to reason; but faith approaches the same world from a different direction; faith is other than reason, and can confound reason. But reason is always there (allowing one to distinguish whether one can trust someone else to conduct a certain action, or one can't, or shouldn't trust someone else.

And little Isaac turned out to be okay. I have faith that you, Banno, will one day be able to ask him yourself if he holds that day against God or his father.

You brought up the practice of interpreting religious doctrine. The Myanmar monks are an example of how useful that practice can be, and of how drastic reinterpretations can be. If you know anything about Buddhism you may appreciate how antithetical ethnic cleansing is to the tradition. Traditions change of course. A key tenet of Buddhism is that everything changes.

Anyway, for Kierkegaard, faith is about accepting the world as it is, and accepting oneself in spite of being an asshole. The stories where God shows up as an asshole are pertinent. I like the fact that the Hebrew divinity has a dark side. There's less of a problem of evil, which Christianity has always struggled with.

If you're convinced that you're all good, how will you notice the signs that you're starting to turn into a Nazi due to bitterness or whatever. It's better to know that you're capable of becoming a monster so you can take steps to change course. You have to start with accepting that you have that dark side. Kierkegaard was right.

Utterly heretical of me to say so, but if there ever in fact was an interaction between El and Abraham, why could it not be the case that El was in search of someone whose ethical constituency El could trust no matter what would happen? So El tested Abraham by giving Abraham an utterly unethical command (something that Satan could have just as easily done while pretending to be El, for example). Abraham toward the end then of a sudden had an ethical epiphany and conveyed to El something like, “fu*k you, I’d rather live in eternal damnation than perform such an unethical act, so I ain’t killing Issac despite the power you hold over me”. So El at that juncture realized Abraham’s goodness of being in the face of extreme duress, and so henceforth trusted Abraham for the good person he was.

Were something along these lines to have in fact occurred, the event would then make far more sense to me.

Again, I get it, it’s a very heretical interpretation of events. Given by someone who does NOT know the bible like the back of his hand. The heretic that I am, though, I will fall back on the bible / torah having been written by imperfect men via their own less than perfectly objective and, hence, biased interpretations of events, such that that part about El intervening in Abraham’s killing of Issac could well be an untrue written account of the events which actually transpired.

Since this is a philosophy forum and not a church schooling, I thought it worth sharing this interpretation alongside those previously offered.

Again, I get it, it’s a very heretical interpretation of events. Given by someone who does NOT know the bible like the back of his hand. The heretic that I am, though, I will fall back on the bible / torah having been written by imperfect men via their own less than perfectly objective and, hence, biased interpretations of events, such that that part about El intervening in Abraham’s killing of Issac could well be an untrue written account of the events which actually transpired. — javra

The Bible was written by men over an extended period of time and it was not originally written as a book of values and norms. How the Bible became holy is a whole different analysis. This is also why literalist interpretations without reference to other commentaries result in interpretations never accepted by any tradition.

Norms and values are learned and known from living in a society. It's common that very religious people have never read much of the Bible. It's also the case that most very law abiding people have never read legal texts. The written word is often reserved for experts who are called upon when questions about the rules arise (priests, rabbis, lawyers, etc.).

In other words, values and norms precede text and the text eventually relied upon for thhe norms might be ad hoc, meaning the text has been made holy, so now we interpret it to say what we knew to be right and wrong already. This is not disingenuous interpretation. It's just a manner to give authority to moral claims. The meaning of the bible will always be its use, so even if it says "murder your mama," but it's used to protect all mothers from harm, it means how it's used, a dictate about protection of mothers.

Problematic to this analysis is the 19th century Christian fundamentalist position that held that the meaning of the Bible is avaliable to anyone who can read. It's the belief in "perspicuity " that God made the text plain and understandable by all, in contrast to Catholic and certain other Protestant traditions.

We battle with this strawman here constantly, where biblical objectors assume this peculiar brand of Christianity is the prevailing (and really only) view and then they offer their two cents on the meaning of every biblical passage. It can't be stated often enough that if perspicuity is rejected (which I do), then a 4 corners literalist interpretation is irrelevant

Were something along these lines to have in fact occurred, the event would then make far more sense to me.

Again, I get it, it’s a very heretical interpretation of events. — javra

I don't think it's heretical. It's natural to retroject our own 21st century moral views to biblical characters.

In Abraham's day though, and continuing many centuries later, human sacrifice was a fairly common and acceptable practice in the ancient near east. It was thought to appease the Gods and bring good harvest and divine favor. So maybe this God asked for it as well. Yet he stops Abraham at the last moment. Much of the Bible looks barbaric from the eyes of a modern human, yet the world was a very different place back then. Maybe our descendents thousands of years later will judge us much the same. Abraham is only human, a man of his time - not some perfect Jesus-figure.

Yes. Much agreed.

My stance generally orients on the mythoi we live by (irrespective of whether we happen to be theists, atheists, or something in-between) by virtue of partaking of our common culture.

By analogy, the ancient Greek understanding of Zeus varies greatly. From Heraclitus's notion of Zeus to mythoi such as that of Leda and the swan. In certain interpretations of the latter Zeus, who takes the form of a swan, doesn't seduce Leda but instead rapes her. Greeks who then revered 'Zeus as rapist' would then align their own ethics as individuals with the ideal which they here revered - thereby raping others themselves.

I'm not intending to make a thesis out of this complete with references. My main point being that the stories we tell ourselves and emotively idealize end up having a large sway on our own individual ethos. With these stories often enough in today's culture emerging from that which was written in the Torah / Bible.

Not interpreting these stories ethically but instead interpreting them in manners that, for one example, reinforces authoritarian interests by claiming these authoritarian interpretations to in fact be the so called literal word of God then, in turn, reinforces, in this one example, tyrannical societal structures. Which stand in direct conflict with democratic ideals - that can also come about via certain interpretations of biblical stories. God being Love as one such motif that comes to mind - cliched though it may sound to many.

As previously hinted at, I've myself no issue with people being spiritual. But spirituality does not translate into an unquestioning acceptance of what authority figures, especially those who are authoritarian in character, command you to do and believe. And in my mind set, nor ought it to so equate.

(I don's know if there was an interaction between El and Abraham. But, if there was, its why I uphold the interpretation previously provided: its ethos is an ideal I could look up to, even if I often fall far short of it; rather than being something which conflicts with what is good and right. This in my own ethos and, I venture to say, in most others' as well.)

I don't think it's heretical. It's natural to retroject our own 21st century moral views to biblical characters. — BitconnectCarlos

I'm very glad you believe so. Thank you for so mentioning. As to retrojecting values on the past, to a certain extent this can only be true, irrespective of the values currently held. One can however say that I'm biassed by the notion of the Good of itself being an absolute and determinate facet of all cosmic being. This would enter into a completely different realm of discussion than that of "faith" per se. Abrahamically appraised, though, if Elohim, the archangels, the seraphim, etc. are indeed good, my own inclination is to believe that they all in their own ways align with the Good. (With the latter in certain interpretations potentially being associated with, if not fully equated to, G-d).

The oddest thing is why anyone with faith would object to the claim that The Binding of Isaac is essentially about obedience. If you truly believe there’s a God and God is good, why would you hesitate to obey them? The need for trust to be earned demonstrates the separation. It’s like denying that it’s about blind obedience is an admission that you don’t really believe.

If you truly believe there’s a God and God is good, why would you hesitate to obey them? — praxis

We shouldn't assume that the Hebrew Scripture writers were unfamiliar with angst and doubt. The very question you ask is, I believe, why the story of Abraham was written and became part of the canon. Kierkegaard has a good book about it. :smile:

As humans our perspectives are limited and biased and to draw such broad and universal judgments such as which suffering is ultimately "justified" and which is "unjustified" is beyond us. The book stands against man's hubrism and his tendency of all encompassing judgment. — BitconnectCarlos

This is simply to renege on your responsibility to decide if an act is right or wrong, to hand that most central of judgements over to someone else. To look the other way.

What God does to Job is ethically wrong.

What follows is that if god is loving, then the story of Job is not about god. Or that it's part of an iron-age morality of servitude that we might transcend.

A better lesson would be, rather than accepting one's place, not to accept injustice and to work toward making the world more just.

It can't be stated often enough that if perspicuity is rejected (which I do), then a 4 corners literalist interpretation is irrelevant — Hanover

That argument might hold if there were agreement amongst the learned. There isn't.

However,

Remember then: there is only one time that is important – now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary person is the one with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with anyone else: and the most important affair is to do that person good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life.” — Tolstoy, The Three Questions

And by this standard the stories of the Binding and of Job show culpability.

There's also the matter of scale. I have a reasonable expectation that my plane won’t crash (although perhaps this expectation has diminished in the U.S. under Trump?). In contrast, using faith to justify the belief that the world was created by a magic sky wizard -the literalist's deity- operates on an entirely different level. How can these two phenomena be meaningfully compared? It’s not merely that faith is a poor analogy for reasonable expectation; it's also about the magnitude of the claim being justified. The assertion that we can know the will and actions of a world-creating entity is significantly different from an empirically grounded confidence that air travel is safe. Perhaps the scale of the claim says something about why faith is a necessary concept for some. — Tom Storm

I tend to think of it very much like that, but I find there's a lot to talk about here. The line I've bolded is a good starting point:

It's not entirely a poor analogy. I agree that "scale" is a problem here, but you can correct for that in pursuit of communication, maybe. Let me try to explain (none of this is fully thought through):

The first major difference is this: When I get on the plain I do this fully well knowing that plains can crash. I do not need re-assurance that this plain doesn't crash. I usually don't even think of the possibility, which I'm very much aware of and furthermore wouldn't deny in the moment, either. I have no fear of flying, and I'd be perfectly fine watching, say, an "Airplane" movie on a plane (which might not be appropriate to air on a flight). There's some underlying principle at work; part of it personality, part of it experience (if I'd survived a prior crash, psychology otherwise being equal, I might have a different mindset).

At the core of this, there's just lived habit. Something I don't need to talk about. I'm far more worried about getting airsick (something I've experienced multiple times) than a crash. Why? Experience, I think. It's more imaginable than an airplane crash. Reason, I think, is secondary here, and it works because we tend to experience rare thing less often (though one might be unlucky).

Now, if my psychology were different, and I'd be prone to worrying about crashes I might be inclined to use calming rituals to get over it, find people talking about crashes in the lobby unsettling, etc. I might over time develop a state of knowing-despite-not-knowing, an epistemic buffer between primal worrying and operating on a daily basis - a lifestyle that includes stuff like habituated selective attention and certain modes of integrating new knowledge into this practical cognitive flow.

Now this is limited in two ways: it's limited to a single topic (aviation), and it's personal (the rituals are for me only). And in this way we have little comparison here.

Now I'm fairly sure I have certain more comprehensive thought-rituals like that; thought rituals that don't only comprise the topic of aviation. But it's not accessible to "discoursive consciousness": it's vague and intuitive and there beneath all the daily flow of surface thoughts. And I think this sort of thing is necessary. And I wouldn't be surprised if believers pick up on that and call that "faith".

A computing metaphor would be the OS of your consciousness. Everyone has their own perosnal operation system. And to that effect I actually don't think the analogy is a bad one. Everyone has their own sense of how the world works, as expressed in their daily functioning. But so far it's entirely personal.

The question is how your personal OS tags into your social surroundings; are you faithful, deluded, seeking? What's the relationship between how your mind works, how your daily surroundings work socially, how others see you, how you see yoursef?

I'm a homegrown atheist with Roman-Catholic parents, who went to school in Austria, had compulsory (opt-out system) religious education in school, which was the only time our class was divided between Catholics and Protestants (with the odd student who didn't attend either class, either because they opted out - parental consent needed, or because their religion [or denomination in very rare cases] wasn't covered locally). Now Austria is and has been my entire life a very secular country: that means the overarching daily life does not involve religion: religion is segmented off into its own meaningful province. There's a weak default assumption that church membership implies believe, but surprises are no big thing and change little. That is: I had to explain that I'm an atheist on occasion, and that's always been fine. The funny thing is that it's always also been fine in religious context; I've been to confession if it was part of religious education (optional; I could have refused without parental consent) and told the priest flat out that I was just here to bide my time, and we chatted. Similarly, I underwent "confirmation" - a catholic sacrement establishing your faith - while being open about my atheism in the preperation group. It was no big deal.

Why am I talking about this at length here? Well, because I've grown up in that sort of environment, I'm actually more familiar with the "God-language" as presented by the local Roman-Catholic church than I am with any language that might express my inner compass better. This is a mismatch in what I can think and understand (myself) to what I can express (the other).

The second thing of note here is the lack of hostility towards me-as-atheist has left me with a neutral view of faith. The secularity of the society around me also ensured there's enough commonality in what counts as rational between those within a denomination and those without. (The late seventies/early eighties were also big on the ecomene - so there was already a widespread different-paths-same-goal mentality around, which meant different aprroaches to the rationality of it all to begin with.) I'm fairly sure that, since I didn't distance myself, a lot of the Christians (see above - confession, confirmation) might have thought of my "atheism" as a path that leads to God through doubt. Nobody was ever impatient or pushy. People from back then I considered truly "faithful" (in the religious sense) had a calm and... serenity? to them I could never match. I'm the slightly nervous, always ironic type.

When the ideology that surrounds you is pretty familiar in its verbage, but is decidedly not what you intuit and makes no sense, but what you intuit has little to no verbage attached to it (in your mind), it's easy to externalise faith as what others do. However, there really is something that is missing - and that's a layer of social integration, a sense of ontological security - I'm living in an absurd world that nobody can explain to me. But at the same time, I have my thought habits I'm fine with. A gambler's mindset perhaps? That would work if I could see win-conditions...

Basically, to the extent that me being an "unbeliever" is relevant, I'm living in a world with an ideology I don't share; I'm living without ideological validation, and without the language to explain myself. Because of my above experiences, I've never sought out sub-groups to integrate into - so now I have a lived substratus of praxis, very little ideology I feel like defending (some relativism, but not really fervently), and a generally ironic attitude towards the world.

To some degree there might well be something like proto-faith here, who knows? The problem is I don't attach to abstracts very well. I have my favourites (relativism, phenomenology - for example), but it's more like a best-of list than something I deeply identify with. If what I have is faith-like, then it lacks an obvious target.

If fiath is "faith in..." then my "in" remains a question mark. I certainly don't have faith in airplanes; I know they can crash. And they can certainly crash with me in them. If they do? Bad luck. So what do I have faith in here, then? Luck, since I just typed "bad luck"? Maybe. But, see, there's no elaborate ideological system built around that. You just learn to live in a world where bad things can happen - one way or another.

Take marital faith as an example: you having "faith" in your spouse implies having internalised the rules of living around you. You know what marriage is, what you should do, what you should want, what you can expect. It's not just the person; it's also the social role - the lived praxis of being married. You can make your own rules, but they'll start out as deviations from a learned default. And the faith in your spouse has a both a target and a form in a lived-through social institution which you perpetuate and modify just by living "normally". And when things go wrong, you work it out.

But your faith has a target, and it has meaning in a specific institutional context; one you participate in. Similarly, having faith in God is meaningful in a particular social context. How much you internalised is an issue here. But with no such institution to appeal to what is the meaning of my putative faith? Where do I get it from?

I have the personal level, same as more or less everyone, sure. But beyond that? If we're both bottles that contain liquid, I just kinda stood out in the rain, while others might have filled under the tap, or even with a funnel... Not sure how much of this makes sense; I guess I see the biggest issues being social. How much social control and legitimisation, from where, from how many sources? How much in-group/out-group conflicts do you encounter?

So is the analogy a good one or a bad one? I feel like you can tilt it this way and that; an attempt to build a bridge, or an attempt to solidify positions (e.g. relgion vs science - not a popular conflict around me). So what is faith?

It's an interesting question, but in my daily life it's really just a word I don't use often (I did in this thread, for obvious reasons). And that means when talking on the topic I have little at stake, but it's also never homeground. So do I have faith in... something? Maybe. Then what follows from that?

That was the sacrifice - not the act of a madman; not someone blindly obedient - it was a fully informed decision to, despite all else, trust God. — Fire Ologist

...to the extent of performing an abominable act. That the decision was as you suggest "fully informed" only serves to add to the affront.

Had Abraham acted as suggests, the story might have had some merit.

And we might follow on from reply to you to ask who it is to whom you owe obedience.

So we have faith as either trust or belief, taken to an extreme. Considered as belief, it becomes believing despite the evidence; considered as trust, it becomes trusting to the point of engaging in turpitude.

Neither of these is acceptable.