Neanderpundit

1: Welcome back, Chocolate. Mmmmm.

2: Welcome back, more than one small cup of coffee a day.

Goodbye, relentless headaches.

No, not the George Michael song, but the real thing.

Tam suggests I’ve tortured logic to prove that faith and belief are different things. This is not my assertion, but the plain and simple fact, I’m just trying to find a clear way to express it- maybe Webster will have better luck at that than I.

From: Websters new Synonym Dictionary, 1973:
A DICTIONARY
OF
DISCRIMINATED SYNONYMS
WITH ANTONYMS AND
ANALOGOUS AND CONTRASTED WORDS

The technical difference between “Faith” and “Belief” is pretty clear- it’s not like, in 1973, people were that much more thoughtful than they are now, but at least by then, the slow campaign of dumbing down the language had not yet reached it’s current state.

(Click to embiggenate)

Now, reading the definition, as it stands, it’s easy to make the assumption that faith and belief are similar enough to be indistinguishable. “Someone told you about Jesus/Mahomet/the Flying Spaghetti monster, and you believed it, and that’s your faith”.

Erm, no. This is the anti-theists explanation for just about everything.

To people with no faith, faith and belief are the same thing. To people with Faith, there is clearly a difference.

Belief is widespread, and therefore common- common not in the “Widespread” use of the word, but common in this use oif the word:

6: hackneyed; trite.
7: of mediocre or inferior quality; mean; low: a rough-textured suit of the most common fabric.
8: coarse; vulgar: common manners.

Faith is rare, and therefore not common, in those same senses of the word.

On Easter Sunday, I pray for all that come here to read that Faith comes to you, as it has come to me.Faith does not exist in the world for you to become holier-than-thou, if so it certainly has not worked on me. Faith just does an excellent job of making the rest of creation make a lot more sense.

Much thanks to old friend Pascal for finding this and scanning it for me from his personal collection.

has an IT guy who really knows his shit.

He’s been instrumental in making sure that all the equipment works together, helping us to integrate our “new” machines to his older machines, and helping us make machine mods he needed to integrate the finished cells to the company’s enterprise system. He’s been around for ages, and rather than becoming a worthless old retainer like many of his vintage, he continues to do more and learn more and be more valuable. He’s retired several times already, and they keep bringing him back. He does exactly what he wants and nobody questions because he always does his job, and the jobs of several others besides. He has a couple of children, and is as protective of them as any father, and his values are Christian and deeply moral.

When O got elected, I sort of wondered how he’d feel about it, being a politically active black man. I wasn’t going to ask him, but it wasn’t long before someone else did. “I think we’ve turned a sort of a corner as a nation, that we could elect a black man. I just wish it had been someone qualified to do the job”.

I spoke to him yesterday, and he reiterated this position, stating that the Obama presidencey had, as he put it, “Set race relations back a hndred years. Who will trust a black man now?”

I wish I could disagree.