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Originally Posted by Xaccers
Well going by that wiki article, to me it seems I'm on the right track. A meme is an idea that can evolve, expand, and cease to exist etc.
I can see how religion can be seen as a meme, it's an idea, it fits with other likeminded people, so expands. Other religions come along, they fit better or are forced to fit, and the old religion gets forgotten, the death of a meme, and in it's place is the new one, which propergates and mutates as it goes.
Isn't that what happens with religion? A religion "fits" with someone, so they adopt it, and propergate it to their children etc, over time, due to the affect of other memes, for instance homosexuality and divorce being considered acceptable, it changes.
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Not really. People's ideas about religion may shift one way and back again over time, but Christianity is underpinned by a written body of teaching that has not changed.
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Faith in a human being is based on your actual experience of them, what you know there reaction to similar situations have been, not what you've been told their reaction would be.
For instance, if I were invovled in an accident, left with a broken leg and a complete stranger, if he said he was going to get help, I'd have hope he would, but I wouldn't have faith that he would.
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I agree with your definition of faith in a person (human being). However you are misunderstanding the concept of a Christian's faith in God. The focus of Christian faith is not in whether God exists, it is in God himself, his character, and his reaction to situations - much the same as you stated above with relation to human beings. It certainly
begins with a step of faith over the issue of whether he even exists but once that is established in the life of a believer, he can move on to other issues that grow out of that without constantly revisiting that first question. A Christian no more starts each day reminding himself that there is such a thing as God any more than you remind yourself that your chair won't collapse when you sit down for breakfast.
So you say, but how?