re: #643 Bagua

So the suffering of the martyrs inspires your faith and illuminates the post you’ll not explain?

If say, a madman jumped to his death believing he could fly, would you decide to reexamine gravity?

Does the mad man’s death support faith based levitation or give one pause to think also?

Myself I’m unmoved by the fever or passion of others when judging the merit of the facts and stories they present.

Facts are facts and faith is faith.

Faith proves no fact.

No, the “suffering of the martyrs” is only one piece in a very large puzzle, by itself it does nothing.

If a “madman”…no reexamination necessary, he was mad. If, however, you did this, I’d want some investigation. I’ll bet you were pushed, or depressed over something else and maybe just made a statement about gravity as some kind of f-this world type thing. I don’t believe in everything every tortured martyr believed in. Some were insane, some were brainwashed, some were innocently wrong and some…were right.

As for faith proving no fact, there is the placebo effect. I just read something that it is increasing which results in some modern drugs not being approved today because they don’t have sufficient clinical effectiveness but would have been approved a few decades ago when the placebo effect was lower. There’s speculation that faith in modern medicine has increased the placebo effect.

I think this is an interesting example of nothing more than faith creating a real physical effect. What if my belief in a non-existent imaginary God makes my life better in a way that could not have been brought about by my devotion to logic and reason? Am I a fool? Should I be disparaged for not worshiping at the foot of Plato, Aristotle and Frege? Or, might I be on to something?