{"id":52,"date":"2008-10-31T09:49:33","date_gmt":"2008-10-31T16:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/?p=52"},"modified":"2008-10-31T09:49:33","modified_gmt":"2008-10-31T16:49:33","slug":"faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/word\/?p=52","title":{"rendered":"faith"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right;\" title=\"hearing-voices2\" src=\"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/word\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/hearing-voices2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"155\" height=\"117\" \/>Religion has been getting a bad rap. But it&#8217;s not Religion that&#8217;s the problem. It&#8217;s Faith. Faith extolled as unassailable virtue. Faith in the light of conflicting or even contradictory evidence. That&#8217;s actually the psychiatric definition of <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Delusion\">delusion<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Cling to any <em>other<\/em> such belief (in light of invalidating evidence), and people will rightfully worry about you. For example, that there is <!--more-->someone you can&#8217;t see who is telling you to do things&#8230;\u00a0 But call it your &#8220;religious faith&#8221; and all is forgiven. In fact, it is blasphemy to question you about it. Rude, and improper.<\/p>\n<p>And all of this would be fine, if it weren&#8217;t for those TRUE believers. <strong>We in western culture are so used to lying about our &#8220;faith&#8221; that we cannot even recognize the real thing when it slams into our buildings with jets.<\/strong> True believers truly, really, really truly <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">believe<\/span>. True believers think rape victims should be forced to carry the resulting pregnancy to term, and will gladly blow themselves up just to take a few infidels with them. We can&#8217;t begin to understand them, so we label them &#8220;wingnuts,&#8221; or &#8220;the fringe.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Then, we turn around and praise &#8220;the faithful,&#8221; without question. This is not good.<\/p>\n<p>A society that condemns &#8220;fanatical&#8221; belief with one hand while shielding &#8220;believers&#8221; from inquiry with the other is perpetuating and enabling the central problem facing the modern world: that True Believers (the <em>real<\/em> kind, immune to evidence or inquiry) are potentially the most dangerous individuals on the planet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Religion has been getting a bad rap. But it&#8217;s not Religion that&#8217;s the problem. It&#8217;s Faith. Faith extolled as unassailable virtue. Faith in the light of conflicting or even contradictory evidence. That&#8217;s actually the psychiatric definition of delusion. Cling to any other such belief (in light of invalidating evidence), and people will rightfully worry about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/word\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/word\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/word\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/word\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/word\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/word\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/word\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/word\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorbornia.com\/word\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}