Gadianton wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 4:56 am
I don't think faith as risk assessment is a convincing framework for what religious people generally mean when they say to have faith. I definitely don't believe the actuarial definition of faith is compatible with what's in scripture.
A long time ago I decided the best exegesis of faith is found in horror movies. Disbelief in the supernatural and especially, mocking the supernatural or disbelieving a report about the supernatural is a death sentence. Believing in the supernatural won't necessarily save you, but it is a necessary condition, because it requires you to think in terms of whatever random supernatural logic is in play. You have to beat evil by it's own rules.
The Bible isn't a philosophical text. Faith is tied only to its narrative, it isn't an abstract principle. You can't wonder if the people who worshipped Baal had faith. They didn't. If you believed and followed Jehovah or Christ you had faith. While worshipping darkness and trusting the arm of flesh is something that occurs in a way that mirrors how people follow and worship God except to a bad end, it still isn't ever described as faith. If you believed in Christ's resurrection but didn't see, you had faith, if you believed in Satan's -- whatever his thing is -- but didn't see, you're just deceived. There isn't an "anti-Christ' version of faith aside from basic deception.
Even in James or Alma 32 what seems potentially abstract is never hinted at being applicable to anything but the gospel in the exegesis. Showing your devotion to Satan by works of darkness cannot be called faith. And of course, in the scriptures, disbelief and mockery is a ticket punch to damnation and eternal hell.
I think you are largely correct here. I did a quick search and only found a couple instances were faith is described as being in something other than God or other good things. I think the word trust is probably better used here. In the scriptures we can trust in God or trust in man, Satan, etc. I think the main purpose of the OP wasn't to say that faith and trust are absolutely the same thing. I think I was just trying to point out that they are much closer than most people realize. At least, that is what it was for me. As I've talked to people leaving the church over the years, there are lots of reasons people leave the church, but I've found two that are almost completely consistent. One of those is a poor understanding of what faith actually is. How it applies in their life, and what it looks like to have faith. If you substitute the word trust for faith in those discussions, it sometimes help them see better. Trust is better understood, generally. In my case, it helped me bootstrap up to a more nuanced understanding of faith.
What is most striking then about the commonality between horror movies and the gospel of Jesus Christ, is both deal with literal worlds, not hypothetical ones. How ever that particular world is in the horror movie mirrors how the particular world is in the gospel. If you laugh at supernatural or religion that isn't true in that world, the intent in the abstract is meaningless, there is no penalty. If you laugh or ignore the true religion you are screwed. From a modernist standpoint it sounds like I'm saying all evil is existential evil. If you walk by a dark cave and laugh and flip it off and a bear happens to be there and comes running out, that seems to be a very similar fate to the fate of laughing at the report of a demon but then whoah, there really was a demon. But that's because we're so used to thinking in counterfactuals, we want to say that it can only be a fate deserved in principle if it works across all possible worlds -- if disrespecting a dark cave is bad universally. But that's imposing a framework that is false for the sake of horror movies or the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If you happened to disrespect that dark cave that had a bear in it, and the bear attacked you, it's a fate justified by the narrative of that world. End of story. And if you didn't believe Jesus, but two weeks ago you also ignored some other guy who sounded similar, then you reap damnation in the one case and it's justified, while not in the other. End of story.
I'm not sure I completely follow you here. Are you saying that you can always find the "rules of the game" by testing consequences? I would imagine you would allow for delayed consequences, which happen in practice. I guess I probably just didn't follow you completely.