[MF] faith, hope and love

david buchanan dmbuchanan at hotmail.com
Sat Jan 28 17:03:38 PST 2006


Kevin said to Ted:
Faith, to me has more to do with how truthful and honest a person is with 
themselves and the people and events in their life than with theories and 
concepts.  A person with strong faith is a person who has character and 
integrity and knows when to check their ego.  For me, a person's true self 
and their faith come from the same source.  And it's not the ego.

dmb says:
Yes, behold my magnificent humility. So let me get this straigt. Now having 
faith means having character, integrity, humility, truthfulness and honesty? 
Does that mean those of us without faith are spineless ego-maniacs who lie a 
lot? If I wasn't such a genius at keeping my ego in check, I'd probably feel 
a little insulted by that.

But seriously, Kevin, don't you remember my complaints about the meaning of 
the term "faith"? Like I said, nobody has ever supplied me with a definition 
that I could understand. And I have to say that your posts on this topic 
have been no different. You've equated faith with way, Way, WAY too many 
things and, oddly, almost none of them bare any relation to the 
conventional, dictionary definition of the word. And don't you think its 
true that things like hope, love, honesty, character and all that - don't 
you think these belong to humanity rather than just Christians or other 
people of faith? In fact, I think one could make a case that faith, as in 
the willingness to believe certain things without any evidence or even in 
the face of evidence to the contrary, is a form of self-deception. Richard 
Hayes made that case in his "RITUAL, SELF-DECEPTION AND MAKE-BELIEVE: a 
Classical Buddhist Perspective", if you're interested...

http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes/ritual.pdf

Thanks.
dmb

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