Cannot grasp the concept of faith....could it be my AS?

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Excuse me for taking a break, I don't have a lot of time to respond. In many ways, Santa was my intro to the fallacy of faith. I was never taught about him, our family is Jewish but very secular, but I realized that other kids around me believed it to be true. And the adults actively encouraged this, and discouraged me from telling them it was all made up. I realized that God is the same thing. People mistakenly think it's good to fool children into believing in Santa, because look how cute their gullibility is.

Your argument for faith is a straw man. As I said previously, your new agey interpretations are not something shared by most people, they turn traditional religion into merely a philosophy. I agree this is more defensible than versions which are more true to their origins, but frankly I don't care. I can't refute every form of faith, there are too many. I don't think personification of the universe is a positive thing. If Jesus told us to become like children, I would say that is like seeing things for the first time, and children are born like blank slates. It would be unwise to fill their heads with religious nonsense. Reality is too interesting.

AspE thanks for responding. You seem like a good person. The problem here is we are functioning from two entirely different paradigms. You seem unable to grasp that one thing can represent something else, that Santa does not mean Santa and yet Santa does mean Sabnta. that there is no Santa and yet there is:=). This mystery is the very secret of life, but this is apparently not a possible concept for you to grasp...Yes reality is interesting, but you are missing something that I and other people are seeing. Thank God I have story. Thank God I was given story.

II know many Jewish people both secular and religious and if you were raised secular you may have missed developing a rich inner world that many of these Jewish people have.

Do not take magic away from children. Sana Claus has an inner meaning that is related to the winter solstice, but maybe I will wait till Christmas to write about this, as we are almost there.

Re children being born like blank slates, yes. This is probably what Jesus meant, to get back to that place, but yet to be grown up, .to retain the knowledge of how to live and be but without wrong ideas and false attachment....I guess I will have to start writing about this...By the way I have two children and did not bring either of them up in any religion, which seemed so intelligent at the time to me but is one thing I now regret. I did take my Grandson to a lot of Buddhist teachings with me at the time I was studying that religion and he used to sit on the floor with a little book and draw or take little child notes of the teaching. I think this did profoundly affect him to be there as the atmosphere of great compassion really does touch the human heart.....

Re being new age, you are hard core wrong. I hate that crap. It is to me shallow and moronic. I am coming from I guess what you could call the ancient tradition. Maybe we should agree to disagree, but I am not leaving this thread and my aim is to answer the op's question. I think about her sometimes when I wake up in the morning, about what to say to try to explain about faith. I am going to begin to ramp things up, but since you have answered the santa question I do not see how much further we can go...maybe I will go back to the Mother Theresa subject....

I resent the implication that religious faith is what makes life rich, and that atheists are somehow missing something. All they are missing are lies. To proliferate the Santa myth and then pull the rug out from under a little child is to destroy their faith- in adults. Maybe there is nothing to grasp. Maybe faith is delusion. I find depth in philosophies that don't require unsupported assumptions, and in the never ending explorations of science. The actual winter solstice is far more profound and interesting than a misappropriated saint.

When I say new age, that's just a shortcut for liberally interpreting scripture so that it can mean anything you wish it to mean. That's the problem with sacred texts, they can be like an inkblot, used to justify anything you want. When something can mean anything, it means nothing.

To continue on, and back to the subject of faith, nothing is just what it is. In order for people to even want to continue to exist there has to be some dimension of meaning. This is because ultimately human intelligence is able to see through the veil and realize that life is meaningless unless meaning is attributed to it. This is put in very general terms, maybe too general, but is all there is time for now.

I have never said that a person has to have faith in anything that isn't true. In short, to do that would be stupid, and I have said this from the beginning, but to have real faith is like having bread. It is the very sustenance of life that opens the door into an entirely different dimension of Being in which everything begins to make sense.This is why breaking bread together is not just a literal experience but also symbolic. You could say it is the sense that being connected will sustain, and that making such a connection makes sense. So, in a sense, sense makes sense, but this sounds like nonsense unless some kind of meaning is read into it, meaning unless the material is put into a greater context...

It is the very definition of religious faith that it is belief in something which cannot be shown to be true. And if, like you are saying, it's not something that should be taken literally, it's like a bridge to some essential truth, then you are admitting it's just mental trickery.

AspE...you're a good person, and I know you have an intent to understand, though in some way you are also replaying an agenda, but you're just missing it. You seem to be thinking the name is the thing...and this is a common error...Many, even most people think this. Here is the key to understanding many things: It both is, but it obviously at the same time isn't, as all understanding is contextual, so in this sense nothing is ultimately true. So there are two worlds in conjunction, but people get stuck in one or the others, so are not able to process material comprehensively. You are missing a very rich and generative world.

I do not get how you have come to the conclusion that I am saying that faith is a bridge to an essential truth. Where did you get this idea from? Who would decide what truth is essential??? Everything that exists is relative and contextual in that it is interconnected to a person's own subjective understanding.

Essential truth is a shortcut for " the door into an entirely different dimension of Being in which everything begins to make sense".

Here is something for you guys to think about. The knowledge you have about the existence of God and who he is. Where did it come from? did it come from nature? More then likely it came from another person. Ask yourself this. If you can't just simply walk away from civilization and into nature and learn about god and who he is on your own then what make you think that the people who wrote these religious book have any clue who he is or even if he exists at all. And don't tell me that god chose only a few people to reveal himself to because that's bullsh!t.

if it weren't for the faith in something better than this life waiting for me, I woulda taken a long walk off a short pier ages ago. faith is what keeps me going, knowing that I am not allowed to take any shortcuts to heaven on pain of having to go to the back of the line.

It sounds like you are saying I am saying that the truth exist outside of oneself and this is what sense is, sort of like what in zen is meant by suchness. This is in no way what I mean. Nor do I think this experience of "Being" is ultimately true. It also is relative, So there are these two aspects--that one can see through the veil and realize that nothing is ultimately true and that also this seeing that nothing is ultimately true, which IS ultimate truth, is also not ultimately true. I do see that when I capitalize the word Being it makes it difficult to understand, but without the capital it is even more difficult. By Being I do not mean a person or God, but a state or quality of experience in whi9ch on a physical/emotional level a person consciously realizes interdependence, and this creates a substance (which also is not ultimately true.) .

I am thinking this thread has quite a few hits today. Who is mainly following it and what does it mean to you?

I talked to an eighty-one year old woman about heaven two days ago who called my home by mistake looking for a nun, and she said if my heart is good and pure I can go there even if I am not a Catholic. It was very beautiful.. I get maybe one call like this every year (though did not get any last year) as my phone number is one digit off from a nun's. I love it when I get these calls and asked her to call me back sometime.

^^^
the LDS believe that heaven/eternal life is a "freebie" for everybody.

This thread's getting a lot of hits and I am not sure if it is from people who want to have faith, people who do have faith and want other people to have faith, or the people who do not have faith and do not even know what real faith is and yet do not want other people to have it. I opt it is maybe the first two.

Here is the thing with me and religion..it is beyond a special interest...I love that stuff...and am talking about most any religion here...(as long as it is not what I would call fundamentalist, as that turns me way off),.but with me I do not really believe in anything, yet you are talking to a girl (old woman, but still good looking:-) who can see elves and fairies. One thing for sure, believing there is a heaven will not get a person to heaven. That is beyond ridiculous. In fact believing anything will not you much of anything.. That is just magical thinking or immature blind faith, not conscious faith, but the way you are processing data can affect the slant of what you are experiencing, and it can and will affect the world around you.

When these two Irish guys came to my business, and one of them was buying a gift for his wife, I ran my leprechaun thing past him (energetic structures or packets you can feel in the spring, something to do with red and green--ha ha--but I didn't tell him all of this...just kind of alluded to it), and I could tell he was thinking what the F?-- but he also could feel I was talking about something..I think he was a tad out of touch with his own culture.

Can there be leprechauns and heaven, too? Yeah there can if you're from Ireland:-)

But about so called heaven and the women who called me by mistake instead of getting a nun...some Catholics are quite authoritarian, and also a lot of Christians think that if you accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior and try to lead a good life (and convert other people to your cause) then you will be saved. How ridiculous is that?

According to my thinking, actual heaven, if it exists, must exist on earth. That is what the Lord's Prayer is about, imo, and a lot of Christians think this, also. They are experiencing something on earth which is what I was experiencing when I was talking to this 81 year old women who called me by mistake. .I was getting a kind of contact high and so knew what she was experiencing when she said the word heaven,, even though the word heaven came up only once at the end, used by her. I knew exactly what she meant. So heaven, as it meant to her, and which I experienced from talking with her, is in some way connected to earth, and as I recall in the NT, I think Corinthians, there is something said about celestial earth.

Sylvia Browne believes that heaven is 3' above the earth and at a 45 degree angle in terms of a alternate dimension.

Those coordinates translate to second star to the right and strait on til morning. But that's where Neverland is, not heaven.

I can't say I would be that flattered. It sounds rather condescending to me. I don't want to join your fantasy league of the living dead, not if I have to share it with a bunch of sanctimonious grandmas. I'd rather be in hell with Mother Teresa.


Faith is belief in things without evidence, or even in light of contrary evidence. There, now we have no excuse not to know what it is.


So you are one of those nice old ladies who happens to be batshit crazy. I can dig it, I've had friends who were schizophrenic, but you've lost all credibility with me as someone in touch with reality.