What is faith?

[YaeMPs]

This is my first post, I hope these questions don't seem too naive.

What is faith? Just belief?
Is any faith as good as any other?
How can you overcome your own skepticism to 'achieve' (is this the right word?) faith?
Why must spiritual matters require faith? By that I mean why can't God be less ambiguous about his existence?

[realthinker]

This is my first post, I hope these questions don't seem too naive.

What is faith? Just belief?
Is any faith as good as any other?
How can you overcome your own skepticism to 'achieve' (is this the right word?) faith?
Why must spiritual matters require faith? By that I mean why can't God be less ambiguous about his existence?

I believe faith to be a personal adherence to a coherent but unprovable set of ideas, often with the knowledge that those ideas are contrary to other widely held ideas.

A person with faith has decided that when faced with troubling thoughts or new ideas, there are certain ideas that will by default be their basis of reason. Rather than try to resolve the day-to-day discrepancies that one encounters, a person with faith dismisses ideas that are contrary to their personally accepted basis of truth. That may, at times, require inventing whole new ideas to preserve the coherence of that basis of truth, but in the end it's faith that wins.

[Miles]

FAITH

In religion it's the belief in the truth of a doctrine that may not be capable of being proven true by reason or evidence, which might require a willful suspension of rational judgment.

[DeBunkem]

Wishful thinking impelled by fear of death.

[handofnergal]

This is my first post, I hope these questions don't seem too naive.

What is faith? Just belief?
Is any faith as good as any other?
How can you overcome your own skepticism to 'achieve' (is this the right word?) faith?
Why must spiritual matters require faith? By that I mean why can't God be less ambiguous about his existence?

In my opinion all too often the word faith is abused, it has become a polite euphemism for a respectable position taken up by a believer of a god in the absence of evidence. I make a distinction between faith and belief, one can have a belief in something with little or no faith. I believe that acorns fall from trees, but no faith is required because it is demonstrable and not an extraordinary claim.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and even miraculous claims are either demonstrably false or have no evidence. If I may be so blunt, faith has become a term for a respectable kind of belief in the light of a certain kind of ignorance.

I am a contrarian: I do not believe that belief based on unsubstantiated and fantastic claims are respectable or excusable. In the 21st Century there is no excuse for either willful ignorance or cognitive dissonance. I do not respect atheists more than theists necessarily, and I do not discriminate against them - I can't I have too many theist friends. However, if I know that someone believes certain things, such as that by saying some words in Latin a bread wafer turns into the body of Christ, my opinion of them suffers if ever so slightly.

Otherwise, I am glad to see that you have posted, welcome to the club...I gues; I am new here as well as you can see

[realthinker]

Faith is the realization that the body of truth that one has accepted is internally incoherent, and that the consequences of recognizing the portion that is untrue will cause an unacceptable degree personal strife. Rather than confronting and resolving the incoherency, one decides that is of no real consequence and leaves the explanation of it as a matter of "faith".