Religions, especially Christianity and Islam, are really stuck on this faith thing. People are supposed to have faith in certain stories and not others. People like me who just don't care about the stories are said to have no faith. I disagree. In fact, it's the opposite.
I do believe in God, even if I don't understand everything about him/her/it. I simply have no faith in religion. Religion is symbols. Symbols for God and the things represented by God. The Jews, for one group, used historical metaphors as well as the usual myths. Who knows? At some point the older myths that inspired Genesis were historical, just embellished over time... started as legends, became myths... Heroes became gods... Gods became God...
A big jump for monotheism occurred because the Israelites were wanderers. The temples and priests of the old religions, not there, they had to find some way to get what they needed from the divine. As a result the startling conclusion that God was really everywhere and one did not need to be a priest to have a relationship with him/her/it.
Similarly for reasons I can only speculate about, Hindus came to the conclusion that all the gods were one. What's funny is that monotheism and pantheism came to distinct ways of looking at this omnipresent God. One said never to worship the idols or fall for the conventions of symbolic worship, the other encouraged such worship as God was in all these things. I tend to go with a mix. I myself see no need for idols, but I cannot look down on one who does, provided that he or she understands the full significance of the action (and even if they don't, I don't care all that much).

But what do most of the religious worship? Is it God or is it the stories? What if we found for a fact that Jesus was a made up person? Of course, many would just not allow themselves to believe it regardless of evidence. That is what they call faith. I differ on this.
I don't care if Jesus was real or whether the actions in the New Testament are historically accurate or whatever. No stake in it whatsoever. Jesus is still a symbol of something greater, a God that manifests through Love. He could be a fairy story for all I care. Doesn't make him any less real.
Keep that in mind as you see the debates over how the world was created or whether there's a soul separate from the body or when the books were written. Do people need to believe this stuff to believe in God?
I don't require a faith in fairy stories to believe that there is some presence to the universe that I can convene with, one that brings me a feeling of peace. While you're all out there excluding one another and yourselves, worrying about backing up stories, trying to find something concrete in symbols that go beyond simple matter, and trying to tell others that your symbols are better... just take a little time to question what it is you're really putting your faith in.
Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Ahura-Mazda, a secular conception of love... Whatever... You're either at peace with the universe or you're not. I get the feeling a lot of religious people are not.

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"It's never over... BOY!"
The Tall Man, Phantasm III

Faith is actually commitment to an understanding of God rather than blind belief in literalism. The historical details don't matter to me. The ethics of Christianity and the comprehension of everything that I do as having infinite ethical importance within a divine plan are what matter. A sort of identity of opposites pantheism is actually described in the Bible (John 1:1), and this has great importance in my personal understanding of Christianity.

And yet no one understands this God, with all their different conflicting versions of holy writings and all their different conflicting denominations. It's just tribalism, is all.

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I shall continue to be an impossible person as long as those who are now possible remain possible.
Hypercrites

That is true only if a person sees religion as a social matter. An unfortunately high number of Christians do this and fail to follow the teachings of Christ. For that reason, while I am spiritually Christian, I am not socially Christian, though I don't discriminate against anyone.

There are many disparate versions of the teachings of Christ. To which version do you refer? And just who do you think you are that you presume to pick which one is the correct one?

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I shall continue to be an impossible person as long as those who are now possible remain possible.
Hypercrites

I don't understand why one would be exclusive at all in one's beliefs. In old religions, people learned. Polytheistic religions have a tendency of trading gods. They learn things from one another and, though it is pretty superstitious, trade customs when they see customs that work.
Buddhism had a tendency toward experientialism. I don't see experientialism as exclusive from Christianity. Jesus said that it is better to be like a child. Many take that to mean being mindless and obediant. Why can it not mean to be curious and constsntly irritate everyone by asking "Why? Why? Why?"

__________________
"It's never over... BOY!"
The Tall Man, Phantasm III

I don't. I could be wrong, but it is ethically beneficial for me to follow the Christian faith as I am best capable of understanding it. My understanding not only could be flawed but undoubtedly is flawed. In reply to JavaBlack, I never have and never will stop questioning points of theology. That is why I don't attend any particular church. I find myself in disagreement with the required ideas of all of them. I believe what helps me follow my conscience. For example, if I believe that God the Son suffered and died for my sins, I am less likely to sin. Conversely, if I believe that helping a stranger is ultimately doing a good deed for God ("Ye have done it unto me"), I am more likely to help everyone- even those whom I would otherwise have no reason to think of. The goal is not reward or the avoidance of punishment but rather moral improvement for its own sake.

Faith means that I trust God. I trust that He loves me, I trust that He cares about me and I trust that Jesus died to save me. Without faith, I'd just be another hellbound sinner, wouldn't I? Faith is at the core of all religions, not just Christianity. That's how Satan traps you, because to require proof of God turns people on bad paths to false Gods, which they have no probelm worshipping through faith.

It's not that you have no faith, Javablack, it's that you have no faith in God.

That is your statement of faith.
However in my faith, I would say that your faith is not in the true God.
It seems we are at a logical stalemate.

No Christian has yet to explain in any reasonable or otherwise way how it is that their perception of God is the true one. The lovely argument about faith being the antithsis of logic doesn't answer this concern. Most of the "false gods" you speak of are equally illogical. So just saying that it is about faith trumping logic alone does not point to the God of Christianity.

Face it. If you're God's goal is to get people to have faith in him and he is nasty-tempered enough to punish those who do not, he seems to have a really good time creating other faiths for people to fall for. He must love to punish people. Otherwise he would either place evidence or remove all other faiths.
I have to say, if your God is the true one, I have no intention of spending eternity with him. A guy who only makes sense if you choose not to question him and fully willing to throw you away if you don't blindly accept those things that come from him through second and third-hand sources, especially knowing that part of the core of the main written source is really just heavily altered mythology from an older religion...
If a God is right and salvation depends on his ability to communicate a message, surely that God should be more competent than the one we allegedly have now. If you could step outside of your own head for a moment, you'd understand that.
But it is not actually my wish for you to understand that. Believe what you want. If you want to spend your whole life worrying about souls, that's up to you.

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"It's never over... BOY!"
The Tall Man, Phantasm III

I don't take such an absolutely fideistic approach. There are rational reasons for affirming the existence of the supernatural, but they are too complicated for me to enumerate here. I will post them in a future thread, however. I do, however, think that commitment to any of the faiths out there is non-rational on some level. The goal is to be as ethical a person as possible. I would state that, if a person turned to atheism and improved him or herself ethically thereby, such a person would do better to be an atheist than to cling to whatever distorted version of a religion he or she had been taught. The problem with a viewpoint such as atheism is not its cosmological implications but rather its moral ones. While atheism is an improvement over a religion that actively promoted evil deeds, such as an extremist cult, if taken to an extreme it leads to a nihilist approach to ethics. If I believed that what I did was meaningless, that we are all nothing more than the sum of our parts and that we die and rot, how could I maintain the morale necessary to lead an ethical life? In the long run, I could not, and I doubt that anyone could. For that reason, I think that most people who profess non-religion are unconventionally religious and do not realize it. Then the question is asked: Why Christianity? Well, it has certain unique themes that, if followed honestly, take us to our maximum ethical potential. Judaism and Islam preach discipline, but although many Jews and Muslims practice forgiveness in their daily lives, there is nothing in their beliefs that requires that we forgive the wrongs of others. Christianity preaches this forgiveness, along with discipline and a theme of redemption (i.e. The Resurrection) that does not exist in any other religion. These are only a few of the reasons Christianity conforms to and improves our ability to follow our a priori ethics. Eastern religions, in general, tend to be too vague for practical application. They delve into great mysteries, but they tend to raise more questions than they give answers. That is fine from a purely philosophical viewpoint, which is why Eastern thought has influenced me to some degree, but for a religion to be ideal, it must give answers to the daily ethical dilemmas that we all face.

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