"Faith"

[David Sklansky]

"Regarding your second problem as how to choose among various religions if one is searching, then I would say that you do indeed have to use your rational evidence evaluating faculties as well as your 'heart' to discern same. Even so, if you do winnow the choices down to one, that one will still fall short of 100% certainity which is where faith is required to cross that last bit of doubt. Maybe that doubt will only be 1%, but it will still be there or as I said above, that religion would possess 100% certainity which God does not give so to allow the free will to choose or not. And if one cannot make that last % leap, then perhaps that is where one can choose to accept Pascal's Wager (search other threads on this those who want to criticize - it's already been discussed) even if for only a year, to see if your 'heart' supplies that last bit of faith to what was lacking in historical/empirical evidence."

Actually I should have stuck only to the second problem as it is the more clearcut one. And it is so unassailable. If all religions claim that part of the reason to believe in them is pure faith, how can they expect someone to switch from his religion to theirs? Worse yet, how can they believe that God would expect it, perhaps even sending them to hell if they don't? That person who doesn't switch will point to his own faith and what can they say in return? If they try to say that evidence is overwhelmingly in their favor, their own faith argument goes away. (And even if they were right about their own evidence they are basically saying that the guy who deeply believes his own religion should be punished merely for being stupid, as opposed to lack of faith.)

I suppose one way out of this would be to say that Religion A has a 3% chance of being right, Religion B a 2% chance, All the rest are 1%. So you use your mind to switch from D to A and your faith to go from 3% to 100%. As farfetched as this is and as unacceptable as this explanation would be even to most religious people, it still doesn't explain why almost no one switches from the religion of their birth.