Quote from gms:
That presupposes an accurate knowledge of God. Since knowledge of God is disseminated by religions, and since religions do not agree on many major and minor understandings of God and related theology*, we can only conclude that everyone's knowledge of God is not accurate to some degree**. To define faith as trust in something in which we have an incorrect understanding has to therefore mean incredulity, and not real faith.
*The aspects of disagreement have resulted in more bloodshed spilled than for any socio/political/ideological cause in human history. That alone points to what I believe to be a major understanding about God and religion, and that is, that God is not part of any religion, and that religion cannot lead you to the creator. It can, however, lead you to its version of that creator, but it's a fictitious creation, molded over centuries of man-made input.
**Walk into most places of worship and ask the constituents simple questions about their belief, and they won't be able to answer you, unless they answer you with something they think may sound right, but is baseless, or the default, "just believe!". As a consequence, their faith doesn't do much to dictate their lives, in fact, they often live their lives in contradiction to their claimed belief system. We all know about church-going hypocrites. We all know about pedophile priests. Go into any prison, and you'll see most inmates have a religion, they may even be wearing some small jewelry that designates a public display of their religious identity. Indeed, if belief, faith, trust in God, et al, was such a great force to unite and promote brotherhood and peace among people, countries would be ruled by the principle of agape. But that is far from the case, and always has been, despite the centuries of existence of so-called christian, jewish and islamic nations. Religion has failed. But I will say this. For most people throughout time, their religion is a by-product of where they're born. Their understanding of their belief system runs not too deep. Yet, it's a force so strong that they're willing to kill others over it or be killed.
Which brings me to the fanatics, who have a deep understanding of what they're supposed to believe, yet their inaccuracies lead them to make decisions and actions based on these inaccuracies, which is scary. That can range from a group of people squandering tax dollars by lobbying to change a highway number from its revelation like anti-christ number "666", to backing Israel financially and politically simply on the basis that they believe jesus will need israel to exist if it's to serve as a landing strip for his second coming, to killing other people in the name of their gods.
