Is it just me, or is faith and rationality not mutually exclusive?

Considering that like 99% of all people who use the word "rationality" regulary don't even understand what it actually means and since "faith" pretty much means whatever you want it to... chances are good. By some definition or another, anyway.

4403972 trust me you should get use to people saying stuff without the meaning

4403972 You can rationalize things with faith that would otherwise go unexplained and you can be faithful only to rational explanations, so I guess if you look at it that way the words aren't very mutually exclusive.

4403981 Well, what does it actually mean?

4403996
You could be referring to both faith and rationality there, so I'm gonna do both:

In my native language, there is no separate word for "faith." My belief that the sun will rise again tomorrow and some people's belief in God/s are referred to in exactly the same way. The idea of a separate and special kind of "faith" belief is, accordingly, arbitrary and it doesn't really mean anything concrete. This is evident in the fact that me and them have equal amounts of real proof for our beliefs, really. There is more circumstantial evidence for mine, but that doesn't mean it's correct. Aliens might show up overnight and drop a nova bomb in the sun. The universe might spontaneously pop back out of existence the way from whence it came. Last Thursdayism might be correct and my circumstantial evidence just so much fabrication. Real truth is unknowable. It's literally beyond us. Everything is a belief.

Rationality has nothing to do with either logic or science, not inherently. Rationality means acting and thinking self-consistently. Religious beliefs make many people feel good. If they make you feel good and you want to feel good, then holding them is rational, independently of any other beliefs you hold or how true they are. If they make you feel bad and you don't want to feel bad, then holding them is irrational. If they make you feel bad but you place the importance of holding the correct religious belief over that of being happy, then holding them is rational still. Even insane people are usually rational in their actions, they just hold false beliefs about the world, which makes them factually act against their own best interests. They're in the wrong, not intentionally self-sabotaging.

And that's the long and short of it, really. The concepts are completely separate from each other and only interact coincidentally.

4404028

Most refreshing. Thank you.

I just hear too much about science disproving god or some bollocks.

4404028 Okay, this made a good deal of sense. Thank you for answering my question.

4404037
Speaking as a scientist, science and God really don't interact at all. If God exists, then he never does anything in a way that we could notice, and we sure as fuck have looked hard, so it doesn't actually matter. If he doesn't exist, then everything people say he's responsible for works perfectly fine without him and we don't need to care, so it still doesn't actually matter. Either way, it's not our problem. Science is about how things work, not why. That's for philosophers to waste their time thinking about.

Religion only matters to me insofar as people harm me because of it or force me to comply with theirs. If you don't, then I honestly don't give the flyingest of fucks.

4404042
My pleasure. Annoying loudmouths really give both scientists and atheists an undeservedly bad rap about this. We all have opinions, but some of us manage to not be assholes about it no matter what they actually are.

4404047
4404037

I've always seen learning about the universe as something that's supported by God. It just seems silly to think that an omnipotent being, who allegedly made the universe, would want us to remain ignorant of what it created.

4404061
I really have no opinions on what God thinks about anything. May as well ask what the Strong Nuclear Force wants, or the Planck Constant. It's so fundamentally beyond my comprehension, I wouldn't bother to speculate about it even if I thought he existed.

4403996
I feel like the Bible gave the best definition: "Faith is hope in things not seen." Any rational person could tell you that countries, money, and ownership don't really exist in any meaningful sense, but much of the way we live presupposes their existence. I can trade pieces of paper graced by presidential portraits back and forth because those with whom I trade them have a common shared belief in their value despite there being no scientific proof that such value exists.

4404833 Interesting! Though I'm not really sure that answers my question.

4404833
4405262
It does, but only in the sense that it's a tautology: "believing in things is believing in things." It's not really adding any kind of information you didn't already have before.

Really, though, where Bible quotes are concerned, you really need to bring in the original Aramaic and/or Greek if you want to do anything useful with it. It's why I hate any kind of debate that involves scripture. It's always a giant linguistic clusterfuck in addition to all the kneejerking that talks about religion already bring with themselves.

4405262
If you're question is, "What does the word really mean?" then you're stuck as words, like money, require common agreement to work. If you think it means one thing and use it that way and somebody else thinks it means something else and uses it that way, than by using it you can only talk past each other, not to each other. It has to be discarded and substituted for with other words before any real dialogue can take place.

4405283
I just happen to think that this particular translation of this particular passage happens to be a nice way to simply illustrate the concept of faith. By no means am I attempting an analysis of the text. If Shakespeare or a poem or a historical figure offered a nicer snippet, I would've used that instead.

To move on using my previous post, any word can only really be a tautology because none of them physically exist. There is no additional information beyond the definition we choose to give them. We can't get out the calipers and objectively measure them. Dictionary definitions can be dredged up only to conflict with other dictionary definitions.

Words are a means of communication. If 99% of people don't understand what rationality means, then there are very few contexts in which it is a word and not sound-that-indicates-smartness.

4405332
It was no slight against you, just pointing out that it's not really a definition that communicates anything meaningful. It does sound nice and poetic. I'll tell it to you straight, though: I hate the descriptivist model of linguistics with a passion. It makes any kind of conversation utterly useless because you can just move the goalposts around until anything you say means whatever you want it to mean, all in the service of using emotionally loaded words as a rhethorical tool.

"Sound that indicates smartness" is exactly what 99% of people really want to communicate to others when they call something rational, and I really hate that kind of pretension - which is why I went to the effort of pointing out how low the standard for rationality really is at all.