Faith

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St_Francis

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aprilfloyd said:
I a happy for a new thread - Do you wish to start it?

When you say Catholics believe the teachings of the Catholic Church, I have never taken that stance as true since I was a little boy in Church. Mainly because religion by it’s very nature is based on faith. There have been and are lots of religions with there own Gods. The general consensus seems to be that they are not all - the one. So I can’t except that Catholics believe theirs is ‘the one’ - when they know of all the others.
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First we must consider what faith is: trust and confidence in someone or something. We do *not *have faith in our gossipy neighbor who likes to “improve” a salcious story, but we generally do trust our best friends.

We have faith in, or trust, people based on various criteria. We trust the repairman because his boss has to pay a lot of money for a bond. We trust a scientist because she has several degrees. We trust our doctors because they have passed tests. We trust some people in our lives because they have shown themselves to be trustworthy by doing what they say they will do and telling the truth.

All these are people in whom we have faith.

Now, it is true that we sometimes place our faith in the wrong person. We trust some scam artist, give him money to fix our hoise, and he never returns. We trust some random preacher and end up moving to another country and drinking poison.

So we see that we have to use a lot of reasoning to determine whom to trust, and we have to constantly check on people as well. **Having faith is not something we should do blindly or without thinking. **
 
Faith:

noun
  1. confidence or trust in a person or thing:
  2. belief that is not based on proof:
  3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion:
  4. belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.:
  5. a system of religious belief:
The Church would still stand even if we did not have faith.
 
I love how the writer to the Hebrews describes faith, linking it explicitly with hope: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Faith gives us the courage to hope, I believe.
 
aidanbradypop said:
Faith:

noun
  1. confidence or trust in a person or thing:
  2. belief that is not based on proof:
  3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion:
  4. belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.:
  5. a system of religious belief:
The Church would still stand even if we did not have faith.
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I think the confusion of many comes from the idea that the second definition you list is *all *that faith is. Given that definitions are drawn from the way we use the words, they can change over time. We tend to use trust or confidence where we once could have used faith, but because western ideas of human thinking have changed (long story), we kind of needed a word for the concept of *believing without a reasoned foundation; *hence the idea of “blind faith,” which we now shorten to faith.

From the Catholic point of view, what we want is a *reasoned *faith; St Paul even discusses this when he says we must be prepared to give a *reason *for our faith.

Therefore, the first thing to clarify is what faith is, in order to be able to discuss why Catholicism contains the fullness of truth, why Catholcism makes sense.
 
 
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