Fifth, your understanding of faith is not that which is promoted in the New Testament or by Christian intellectuals spanning the entire history of Christendom. Your rejection of faith is not a rejection of quintessentially Christian faith, but a faith of your own concoction. This, if you have studied logic, is known as attacking a straw man.
I am uninterested in how Christian intellectuals have redefined a word in order to suit their purposes. Far from being a "faith of my own concoction", I am adhering to the recognized definition of the word and understand it to mean a belief in something for which we have insufficient evidence. After all, if we did have evidence for a belief then faith would not be required as evidentiary support would be enough. Faith is believing something to be true without evidence or, at times, in spite of evidence to the contrary. That is what the word means and that is what I am rejecting. If you are expanding its meaning to include trust, reverence, devotion, obedience, or anything else, then simply use those words instead. Assigning additional meanings to existing words not only causes unnecessary confusion, but also serves to bolster their power by providing artificial lattice work. I suspect that is why it has been done and that is why you reject my rejection of faith. Even if you were to accept my argument that things should not be believed without evidence, you have ascribed so many other meanings to this word that knocking down one pillar will not collapse the building. There is a straw man here, but only one that has been overstuffed.
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