[wolfgang]

But you have faith. You must believe in something. If you believe in the Big Bang (for instance), that is faith. You weren't there. All you have is a pile of suggestive evidence. You can't prove anything. You can't even prove that I or anything exists outside of your mind. You also cannot prove that we don't. So, whichever you believe, that is faith.

I suppose I believe in gravity and the 3d world to a high degree because I keep experiencing it the same. I have a really strong repeatable world going on. It's as if I believe in 3d because I know next time I grab something my hand will feel it. It seems like it's always been that way, so I don't need faith to believe it. I'm not taking someone else's belief in 3d and wanting to believe just out of shear faith without any direct experience of 3d myself.

I have many things I could try to believe in and I'd have to use faith to say I believe that stuff. I don't understand how to extend my beliefs with faith, or why I would want to.

1) There's belief that comes from direct experience.
2) There's belief using faith in directly experienced evidence being conveincing "enough".
3) There's belief using faith in what other's say.

Any faith based belief, to me, is not really a belief. It's a "trying on". However, like you are saying to me, maybe number 2 is alot of my "belief" system. I have been convinced enough with my own direct expereince, and I believe something. So, too bad, there seems to be a grey area. Where's the line bewteen 1 and 2? Direct experience versus enough evidence.

I'm confused about this statement, because above you said that faith is based upon a direct, subjective experience that cannot be proven to others. If God visits me and we have a chat, I may not be able to prove that to you, but I did have a direct experience.

I think belief is based on subjective experience and can't be proved to others. Faith is what makes someone say they believe something even though they may not have had the direct subjective experience to know or feel it's true (for them).

If God did chat to you, you would believe it and you wouldn't need to walk out on a limb of faith to have that belief. As opposed to me saying I believe in God because everyone around me says they do, and I decide to believe that too - I would have that belief by having faith, not by experience.

I'm not sure that I said faith is based on subjective experience. A subjective experience is what changes faith into someone knowing and plain having their belief.

I said someone can have a conversion by feeling Jesus in their heart and at that point they don't have to have faith in that belief - they have an experience that makes that belief really true, for them.