Is personal faith a debatable topic?

What might be a good tactic is to at least try and leave them to think over the difference between trust in their faith vs scientific evidence.Their faith is simply based on a story that they have been told. Therefore it relies wholly upon whether or not the first person to tell the story was telling the truth and whether or not the story has been re-told correctly. Taken on its own, there is no way of knowing whether or not any story is truth or fiction.On the contrary, knowledge based on scientific evidence can be checked and tested again and again (in theory by anyone) to ensure it is reliable.Try asking the person in question if they accept that it is possible for scientific evidence to disprove a criminal's fictional account of events. I'm sure almost everyone must accept this. There is no difference whatsover in using scientific evidence to check the reliability of religious stories. A story is a story is a story.

I suppose a lot of the regular faithful have this kind of attitude and it seems to be a comfort thing. They've been brought up to believe in particular certainties, and even if they have to use science in certain aspects of their life (and obviously benefit from it), they still can't abandon their faith. It's like trying to make a child give up their favourite doll or blanket. Do you mean, when we accept scientific facts that we learn without seeing the evidence for ourselves? That's a good point. And I can see how people could get confused if they live in a community where fact and fiction are told alongside each other, without ever seeing the evidence for the things that are fact. How do they know the difference between the fact and the fiction? However, it's very hard for me to grasp how people really could be confused in that way, because there must be such a massive educational and cultural gap between us. I have to be cynical and think that deep down most of them really know the difference, but that they hold on to the stories of faith because of the comfort thing and also a loyalty to family and community.I suppose there's no easy answer. The best bet is to give the person in question the seeds to start gradually thinking for themselves. You can lead a horse to water...

The important thing to do is to make such people think rather than try to convince them by forceful argument. In any case, it's not going to happen overnight. You need to plant seeds of free-thought.I think there were 2 initial ideas that led me to dismiss religious stories.The first was the commonly held view that not all religions can be right, so why believe any of them.The second idea was why would a truly loving and intelligent creator worry about whether or not you believed in him, or whether or not you subscribed to this religion or faction? Surely it is how you behave that is important. And you should behave the same way whether or not there is a god or reward in an afterlife.These ideas are not unique to me, of course, but I arrived at them by my own thought processes and without any attempts at persuasion, as many others undoubtedly have. But they are good ideas to plant seeds of free-thought in peoples minds.