Fanman wrote:I think that faith can be divided into seperate entities; (1) A religious faith in God (2) A faith in cause and effect (3) A faith in other people. With all types of faith we are taking a chance to believe the reality that the faith creates. I would say that self-delusion is faith gone too far, which is not based on any facts or a logical system of reasoning.
For example, the saying "we reap what we sow" is from Christianity. It basically means that we get out what we put in. It is based on a logical system of reasoning i.e. - if I plant seeds, I will grow the plants of that seed. Self-delusion comes when we believe that if we plant seeds we will grow a different plant to the seeds that we planted, so to speak.
Therefore, I do not believe that faith is synonymous with self-delusion, because faith is based on some fact or another. Self-delusion is a belief based on a misconception and applied with fallicious reasoning, i.e. - if one person is a, then all people are a. No all people are not a. Some are b, others are c etc..
"rightly dividing words of truth" is a biblical exhortation that is echoed by philosophy. In this thread, we have "self-delusion" which ought to be rightly divided from self-deception. Robert Trivers has an interesting book out on self-deception, which he argues evolved because humans base so much of their social interaction on lying. When lying to another, we have all sorts of "tells" that give away that we are lying. The game of poker probably exists because the challenge of detecting and suppressing such tells is a sport that we love to compete in.
So, Trivers argues, we have learned or evolved to deceive ourselves so that we can lie and get away with it.
But, this only works with deception, not delusion, which, as you say, goes too far. The deceiver keeps the truth in the back of their mind. But delusion is the act of looking at a truth, and drawing the wrong conclusion. It is lying by a half-truth, not a mis-truth. In theology, the devil deceives, but God, who can not lie, can only delude. Yeshua, in the midst of a conversation about Herod's temple, and standing right in front of it announced that if this temple were destroyed he would rebuild it in three days. But this was He and God the Father deluding the listeners, because, as the disciples later somehow learned, He was talking in that remark about His body, not the monstrous building in front of Him.
In Triver's analysis, the self deceiver lies effectively, but is able to function in their life with a secret, self-serving, agenda. We are seeing this play out now in the news where it seems that some child abusers and those around them have effectively deceived themselves and others, to keep their good thing going without others interfering.
The self deluder, however, has taken the truth, part of it anyway, and turned it into a lie in their own mind. This truth, tucked away in the back of their minds, now is useless, and they self-destruct.
Faith, meanwhile, is defined in scriptures as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." The usual interpretation of this, which I think is delusion, actually from God Himself, is that our evidence that there is an unseen God is blind trust that we show in our lives. To say we have faith then means that we are able to act like we trust God.
But, when I ask God what this definition means, He tells me that the evidence is the faith. What is special about faith is that the evidence points to things we cannot see, which we treat as real even though we do not see what we are dealing with. When we blow out a candle, we exercise faith in air. We blow on our hands, and feel the pressure, trust that air is really there and will respond to our blowing by going to the candle and taking the heat away. The biblical definition of faith means that we are to get God to do lots of (little) things in out lives that we can see (or sense, like blowing on our hands) until we trust Him so much that we use Him to solve our candle blowing out problems.
He tells me that faith and science are the same thing. "the substance of things hoped for" is applied science. The (application of) evidence (stuff we can see) to the reality of God (things unseen) is basic science. He said that the reason He referred in that definition to "things" instead of persons (Himself) was because He wanted us to develope faith in the natural before we took on the spiritual. He said that, in this age of almost mature science, many are prepared to become effective believers, instead of the disaster that is the history of Christianity.