[MD] faith and hope (and a wee bit o charity)

[Matt Kundert]

gav said:
hope is hope that things will get better

faith has no object.

faith is the inward certainty that no matter what 
eventuates everything is ultimately perfect. it cannot not 
be. it is hubris to believe that we can foresee how the 
future unfolds and what may seem calamitous now is seen 
as beneficial with the wisdom of hindsight.

it is the tragicomedy of life which is so beautiful...

matt:
i like the tragicomedy of life, though such an 
aestheticization is commonly supposed to lead to a 
dulling of our moral sense, but what bugs me is the 
"inward certainty"--it reminds me of descartes, and it 
reminds me of all the horrors done by people who gained 
their certainty inwardly (like bush).  i just don't see what 
inward certainty does.

there seem to be basically three different attitudes 
displayed between us:

matt's "hope"  :  things might get better
matt's "faith," gav's "hope"  :  things will get better
gav's "faith"  :  everything is perfect

i have all the interest in the world in my "hope," but it's 
the gav's "faith" that scares me the most.  not just the 
future perfect tense version of my "hope," it has no 
object at all, and is just that serenity that one brings to 
every situation--and this is what gets me--no matter 
what the situation is.

it's like stephen colbert's bit about bush: this man 
believes on wednesday what he believed on monday, 
no matter what happened on tuesday.

i'm reading james again right now, and his descriptions 
of "theory" are not the typical philosopher's circle around 
possibility, showing the necessity of things.  his theories 
are deployed for situations and phenomena that call for 
them--they are built from the ground up.  objectless faith 
seems to forget the ground, forget life, to me.

matt
 		 	   		  
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