Faith is a cop-out

Why is faith a cop out? If the only way one can accept an assertion is by faith,that is an admission the assertion can’t be taken on it’s own merits. If something is true, we don’t invoke faith, we use reason to prove it. Faith is intellectual bankruptcy. With faith you don’t have to put any work into proving your case or overcoming objections. You can “just believe.”

Faith is something you use when you don’t have certain knowledge. For example, which is the stronger statement; "The flight leaves at seven" or "I believe the flight leaves at seven."

If faith is valid, then anything goes. Who can deny that the Muslim terrorists who flew airplanes into buildings at 400 mph had strong faith? Hindus have so much faith that one of their plethora of gods (Ram) built a land bridge (now sunken) between the southern tip of India and Sri Lanka, using the labor of monkeys, that they rioted when the Indian government had the audacity to propose cutting a canal through it to facilitate shipping. Mormons have faith that their founder, Joseph Smith dug up some golden plates and magic reading stones were right. With faith everybody is right!

Hebrews 11:1 says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” In other words, faith is the evidence of non-evidence. It’s a free lunch, a perpetual motion machine. It’s a way to get there without doing any work.

Pascal, the 17th century philosopher, contends the wise decision is to wager that God exists, since "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing", meaning one can gain eternal life if God exists, but if not, one will be no worse off in death than if one had not believed.

How many believers have you encountered who "believe", just to be on the safe side? I have met a bunch. They don't seem to understand that if god were smart enough to create the whole universe, he/she/it is certainly smart enough to see through their own self deception.

“If you lose, you lose nothing” is just not true. We lose a lot in this life by chasing after myths. We sacrifice honesty in order to keep a lie alive.. Religion demands time, energy and money , draining valuable human resources from the improvement of this world. Not only that, religion promotes ignorance. Think of all the bright kids out there who can't afford a good education that could have had one with the 27 million dollars that religious nutcakes spent on building a creation museum in Kentucky.

Nor is it true that the unbeliever gains nothing. Rejecting religion can be a liberating experience that allows one to gain perspective and freedom of inquiry. Freethinkers have always been the heretics of the world while always under threat from one religion or another. Unbelievers don't waste time chasing after the supernatural, giving them a better opportunity to make this world a better place. Most of the progress in the world can be credited to those who don't believe in the supernatural. Somehow we must get it through our thick skulls that we can't just snatch a "belief" out of thin air. Belief without hard, replicable evidence is what got us into the mess we are in. Belief without evidence is what caused 19 well educated men to fly airplanes into buildings at 500 mph.

Pascal had his wager; I have mine. If it turns out there is a god, my wager is that he/she/it will only reward people who have enough courage and intelligence not to believe in him/her/it.