Why is Faith a Virtue?

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I want to echo Iano's statement that nobody has asked that faith be respected by anybody.

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What a selective memory you have, Faith.You continually expect the US government to give your religious faith special privilages and rights while denying others those same rights.

"empiricist dogma."That is an oxymoron.

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Why is it a virtue to base beliefs with life and death implications on something other than empirical evidence?

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Well, you are asking the wrong person, as I don't think it's a virtue at all, but a failing.

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and NOT to believe the honest people who reported it is an act of bad faith and dishonesty and maybe even character assassination.

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What people?

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The honest people who reported it. As I said.

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And I asked, who were those honest people?Who were they?

You are equating philosophical empiricism with scientific empiricism.

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All the people who experienced it and reported it. All the writers of the OT and NT, and all the people they describe as witnessing the evidence.

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Yes, I get that.WHO were they?Like, what were their names? Where did they come from? Where did they go and what did they do? Where are their graves?Where is the outside verification from non-Biblical sources that they even existd, let alone wrote and did all the things you claim they did?

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Eyewitness accounts cannot possibly be "completely untrustworthy" or you wouldn't dare get out of bed in the morning.

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Memeory is not a video tape, Faith.Memory consists mostly of your brain reconstructing your personal perception of events. It fills in blanks and constructs details out of whole cloth, and changes things around to be more consistent with your past perceptions, biases, experiences, and prejudices.Furthermore, the ability to form accurate memories is greatly influenced by your attention and emotions.All of this is very easily demonstrated and as a result of this research the influence of eyewitness testimony in courtrooms has been diminished and the importance of physical evidence has become much more important.That's why it doesn't matter how sure a woman is that the man sitting in the defendant's chair was her rapist if his DNA doesn't match that of the samples collected from her after the attack. It couldn't have been him.Of course, you don't believe in the validity of DNA testing...

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The Bible is self-verifying. It is patently authentic, its authors patently honest witnesses.

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Upon what outside verification and evidence do you base this judgement?Or, are you sayig that you don't need any extra-Biblical verification?That, essentially, "the Bible is true becaise the Bible is true"? Edited by schrafinator, : No reason given.

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The context was SCIENCE. The Bible is history. When you have witness reports you have real evidence of the past.

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But historians do not declare something they read in a single book (particularly a religious book) as historical fact unless they have verified it with numerous outside sources that have nothing to do with that book.You cannot claim the reliability and respectability of academic historical scholarship and also be completely lax and sloppy in your methodology, which is exactly what you are doing.

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Why does Richard not believe in Thor or any other god do you think?

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For the same reason YOU do not believe in Thor. Edited by schrafinator, : No reason given.

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Can you not tell when someone is telling the truth or lying Schraf. I know your in retail so the skills might need some honing. But like, can you not just tell?

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Someone can be telling me something that is untrue and not be lying.They are simply wrong. Mistaken.That's why I don't believe everything people tell me just because THEY believe it to be true, especially if it involves some kind of claim of fact.People believe things for all sorts of reasons, and mopst people believe the truth of the things they hear without checking to find out if they are based in fact or not. Haven't you ever heard of urban legends?Faith's claim that the Bible is an accurate historical document might be correct, and might be incorrect, or might be a combination of the two.Let me ask you, ian.How does one go about finding out if something, say, a crime, happened? Edited by schrafinator, : No reason given.Edited by schrafinator, : No reason given.

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Say you were to stumble across a dusty old box in the attic of your old house. And you open it up and inside there are some old letters and you read them. They are love letters.

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Could you form the impression that the person writing the letter loved the recipient of the letter. Could you form the sense that they were not lying in what they wrote?

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Yes, one could come to those conclusions.What does that have to do with faith in God?I hope you aren't trying to equate those love letters with the Bible, because they are not in any way comparable, other than being on paper.And, as I said, just because they believe what they are saying doesn't mean that they aren't gravely mistaken.Being wrong is not the same as willful deception.Edited by schrafinator, : No reason given.

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Well if you came to believe in God and were told by someone "Here's the Bible - its his word" and you went off and read it and found that the person described (and talking) therein was the same as the person you had come to know then you would have good reason to trust other things that he said that you didn't know by personal revelation. Knowing something of a persons character is one way to crosscheck on whether what is being said fits with what is already established. (Hence the expression "out of character")

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Or, you are so desperate for confirmation of your desires for God to be real that you give a lot of weight to the "hits" you encounter in the bible and downplay or ignore the "misses".Subjective emotion is hardly a "cross check" of facts, Ian.It's confirmation bias at work here.

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Whilst people in those days weren't tecnological this is sometimes extrapolated to infer they were less intelligent than we are.

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I never said they were less intelligent.Quite a lot less sophisticated in certain areas, of course, but not less smart.What you seem to be forgetting is that the Bible was written in the Jewish scholarly style, which makes liberal use of symbolism, metaphor, and parable. It is a teaching tool, not a history or science text.

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A person dies and is laid in a tomb for a number of days in the heat. People then, as now, would pretty well know (and smell) what death is. Then the guy is called out from his tomb by a man named Jesus. Now either there was some fiendishly clever conspiracy going on which made people bury a man who was actually alive - or the man was raised from the dead.

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Its not the kind of thing you make mistakes about. But they could be lying of course. But lets suppose they were innocent of lying until proven guilty. And seeing as there is no empirical evidence, proof we do not have nor shall we ever (this side of the grave/2nd coming)

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Well, right.All you have is blind belief.

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66 books by different authors that support each other and further one story as they do is wonderful self-authentication.

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So any bunch of writings that I find from many different authors who all agree with each otehr as much as the Bible does you would consider self-authenticated?