Having processed this a little more, I want to address some a couple of your implicit questions:
Q: Would you prefer to have faith in a guru and a community of likeminded people, or is it better to have faith in leprechauns?
A: I would prefer neither. My belief is that it is optimal to have faith in what you can determine to be true at the most fundamental level you are capable, and have openness to updating your opinion as you search for truth at a more and more fundamental level.
Q: If you must choose between leprechauns and gurus/communities, isn’t it much more sane to choose gurus/communities?
A: This question is a red herring. The reason is that its not the real choice anyone reading this would be making.
You have chosen an example of faith that is obviously absurd and blind to attribute to me, so that you could make an argument to defeat me and win all in the same comment.
Actually, the point of my response was to illustrate that to say “all of these things are faith” is an incorrectly simplifying assumption. I did deliberately choose an absurd example of faith, not to attribute it to you, but to show the difference between one thing which you did explicitly claim is faith—trust in people—and another thing which would have to be an example of blind faith—belief in leprechauns. If you acknowledge that there is a real difference between the two, it would seem that I have misinterpreted your thesis.
Yes. I do see a huge difference between appropriate faith and blind faith.
It is my opinion that everyone functions based on faith far more than we acknowledge. That much of what we believe we have evidence for is actually based on quite flimsy chains of reasoning, that have lower and lower probability of being true with each subsequent link from the evidence we are supposedly basing the chains on.
It is also my opinion that this is pretty much unavoidable in order to function in the world, and that you pretty much have to function on a faith based system. Even a scientist who understands things at a fundamental level in one area is still probably accepting the world as she knows it based on faith in the majority of cases in her life.
So, it is my opinion that a key first step in being rational is to acknowledge that you have a faith based system, and then to optimize that system based on the acknowledged reality of what it actually is.
Please let me know if what I just wrote makes sense to you. If it does, perhaps this comment might be good as a start for making a second attempt at communication—I think I articulated what I was trying to say better here than before.
Having processed this a little more, I want to address some a couple of your implicit questions:
Q: Would you prefer to have faith in a guru and a community of likeminded people, or is it better to have faith in leprechauns?
A: I would prefer neither. My belief is that it is optimal to have faith in what you can determine to be true at the most fundamental level you are capable, and have openness to updating your opinion as you search for truth at a more and more fundamental level.
Q: If you must choose between leprechauns and gurus/communities, isn’t it much more sane to choose gurus/communities?
A: This question is a red herring. The reason is that its not the real choice anyone reading this would be making.
You have chosen an example of faith that is obviously absurd and blind to attribute to me, so that you could make an argument to defeat me and win all in the same comment.
Actually, the point of my response was to illustrate that to say “all of these things are faith” is an incorrectly simplifying assumption. I did deliberately choose an absurd example of faith, not to attribute it to you, but to show the difference between one thing which you did explicitly claim is faith—trust in people—and another thing which would have to be an example of blind faith—belief in leprechauns. If you acknowledge that there is a real difference between the two, it would seem that I have misinterpreted your thesis.
Yes. I do see a huge difference between appropriate faith and blind faith.
It is my opinion that everyone functions based on faith far more than we acknowledge. That much of what we believe we have evidence for is actually based on quite flimsy chains of reasoning, that have lower and lower probability of being true with each subsequent link from the evidence we are supposedly basing the chains on.
It is also my opinion that this is pretty much unavoidable in order to function in the world, and that you pretty much have to function on a faith based system. Even a scientist who understands things at a fundamental level in one area is still probably accepting the world as she knows it based on faith in the majority of cases in her life.
So, it is my opinion that a key first step in being rational is to acknowledge that you have a faith based system, and then to optimize that system based on the acknowledged reality of what it actually is.
Please let me know if what I just wrote makes sense to you. If it does, perhaps this comment might be good as a start for making a second attempt at communication—I think I articulated what I was trying to say better here than before.
It does—thank you for clarifying your point.