But what if you start with nothing and then develop your faith, instead of starting with faith and trying to justify it?

For example, first you gather evidence/ask questions. You will never reach a definite answer, but in the end, you eventually develop faith in whatever FEELS right based upon what you've learned/gathered from your questioning. This is different from starting with a conclusion (faith) and trying to prove it through questioning.


>if you have faith, your parameters for information
>challenging is AUTOMATICALLY skewed.

I agree, but that's if faith came before the information challenging exercises.

>if i have FAITH in how and why electricity works...then any
>questioning (based off my belief) will naturally PROVE that
>it does. my brain will WORK and WORK HARD to find
>explanation and solutions to any question i could possibly
>come up with. it's like when you set parameters to a problem
>and spend energy looking for an answer that might exist
>OUTSIDE of those parameters...you'll find or CREATE
>something to explain why you can or can't find what you'r
>looking for.

I totally agree. But if you start off saying, "Does electricity exist? Let's do some tests and try to find out." Then your subsequent faith is based on something (you still might be wrong, but it's better than basing your faith on nothing, like you said.

>same thing with philosophical christian thought. the only
>thing is...in areas where there ARE no answers, answers are
>usually created or generated by means OUTSIDE of divine
>text, or at its simplest "best guesses" based on texts and
>opinion.

I agree. I don't know that I necessarily apply "philosophical Christian thought." I like to think I approach these questions without the taint of those assumptions.

For the sake of this discussion, I did accept the assumption that there IS a God, only because without that assumption, it's too easy to answer my questions by saying "There's no God and of course we have free will." But I didn't specify that this divine being was the Christian God, with all that entails.

>why? because some ideologies are just NOT comfortable saying
>"i don't know" when it's approached by something unfamiliar.
>it's sad, but happens.

Definitely. That's why I call myself a Christian in a "loose" sense. I don't want to take someone's else interpretations of things as important as God and religion, I want to form my own set of beliefs.

Basically, I'm not "loosely" Christian because my parents told me to be. I am because I stepped away from all the trappings of organized religion and thought about things, and couldn't shake the feeling in my heart/soul that some divine being exists. And since I believe most religions indirectly involve the same deity (as I mentioned before), it's easy to call myself Christian and not feel like I'm being terribly deceptive. I don't practice organized religion, and my relationship with God is my own, not one defined by others/church.