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To: AndyTheBear
A person needs faith to be functional in any capacity.

I can not pass on coming traffic without some faith that the other driver is not feeling suicidal.

Perhaps you are confusing religious faith with trust. I can observe in my pre-driving-age years, that the vast majority of traffic situations involve people who are not suicidal, and who will do the right thing and stay on their side of the road. If I lived in a society where most of my fellow drivers were raging drunk, and no authority were effectively intervening to prevent this from happening, I might conclude that the roads were not a good place to be. I can make a decision (rational or not) to trust depending on my observations of what actually happens in a given space of time.

Religion does not pass this observational test. Actually, it fails quite spectacularly, since bad things happen to religious people all the time.

137 posted on 01/19/2009 7:46:02 PM PST by hunter112 (We seem to be on an excrement river in a Native American watercraft without a propulsion device.)
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To: hunter112
Perhaps you are confusing religious faith with trust.

Not at all. I'm merely not erecting a fallacious distinction between the two.

The only real working difference between the words faith and trust is that faith implies one acts based on the trust.

Religion does not pass this observational test. Actually, it fails quite spectacularly, since bad things happen to religious people all the time.

Bad things happen to everybody. Thus showing that a religious doctrine that says that no bad thing will ever happen to those that believe it is false. However, you seem to have unwittingly presumed that all religious faith included such a doctrine.

176 posted on 01/21/2009 9:08:46 AM PST by AndyTheBear
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