Is faith allways bad?

(i.e., the faithful person's will is at one with god's).

 This is exactly right… but not only the person’s will, his entire Being is at one with God.  “I and my Father are One.” At this stage of the game you are no longer mortal, you are one with Spirit. So in essence yes, God is the doer.

 You can apply this analogy. God is an ocean and we are waves upon that ocean.  Playing and crashing with the storm of delusion.  We do not realize we are part of a vast ocean and think ourselves as separate.  When we calm (get rid of ego) we sink and merge back into the ocean.

 The ocean can exist without the waves but the waves cannot exist without the ocean.

BTW… I like your other post but you are stereotyping there a bit aren’t you?  I don’t belong to any organized religion but I wouldn’t conclude that all followers don’t seek or require proof.  What you wrote not only could but should apply to one’s spiritual path.  Without evidence or experience how does one know their progressing? 

“...as opposed to religious faith, which can be summarised as "Strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof"

 So faith means "complete trust or confidence" and it would be both imprudent and arrogant to have complete trust in your calculations without some form of evidence because, as the old adage says: pride goes before a fall.

 Even with trust or confidence in your calculations you will need some level of evidence that the calculation is correct. However, with experience you will build-up confidence in your ability to make those calculations and gradually require less evidence that they are correct to the point where you will trust that they are with the minimum of evidence.”

Dean wrote: CosmicVibration wrote: Dean wrote: CosmicVibration wrote: Nevertheless, I perceive this passage from the Bible on faith as being literal: “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘move from here to there’ and it will move; nothing will be impossible for you.” Okay, my curiosity is piqued... If that quotation is to be taken literally then literally what does it mean (to you)?  I should have probably elaborated a bit on the Soul in that post.  The Soul is individualized Spirit.  Spirit or God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient.  The Soul, made in the perfect image of God also possesses those same attributes.  Moving or creating a mountain for an omnipotent Soul is mere child’s play. The more one tunes in to their true nature as an Omnipotent Being, the more so called miracles one can perform. “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘move from here to there’ and it will move.”  To me this means that just a tiny fraction of self-realization can move mountains. Sort of analogous to extracting just a tiny fraction of energy from the vacuum can supply enough power for the entire planet. I can expand much more on any of this when I get home from work… CosmicVibration wrote: According to Albert Einstein,” reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”  Maybe because the mountain is over 99% empty space, the rest called atoms are not material but energy fluctuations. All matter is composed of condensed energy; condensed energy is composed of condensed thought.  Tuning in to the universal consciousness (Christ Consciousness) one can easily make changes to any landscape by the power of his will and thought. Ah right. Unfortunately you cannot switch between quantum mechanics and newtonian mechanics as you are doing here, the terminology used in one is not interchangeable with the similarly named terminology in the other. You also cannot interchange these terms with similarly named terms used in the non-physics world.  For example: the quantum vacuum is a quantum state of lowest possible energy and therefore can also be called the vacuum state, that is: it is purely an energy state that is found, for example, inside a proton (or neutron). Fluctuations in this quantum vacuum are believed to the force that binds the quarks together that make-up each proton (or neutron) and account for 99% of their mass. Since this is a state of the lowest possible energy and quarks are ridiculously small then fluctuations in this energy state is exactly enough energy to bind the quarks together and no more so a fraction of this energy would not power the whole planet. A physical vacuum is a 3-dimensional volume that is devoid of particles, therefore contains no [quantum] energy. A physical vacuum (such as the vacuum of space) is not the same thing as a quantum vacuum.

Empty space is actually a misnomer.  Space is not empty, all space, including the physical 3d vacuum that is devoid of particles.  Every cubic centimeter of space contains more energy than all the stars in the known universe combined. And this is after physicists “renormalized” the calculation.  The answer actually comes out to be infinite before “renormalization”.

I don’t understand why when physicists get infinity as answer to one of their equations it’s “a total disaster?”  I’ve heard this from Michio Kaku…  I on the other hand see infinities everywhere…

Anyway, it’s not just a theory anymore; it’s been verified in laboratory experiments such as the Casimir effect.   Call it vacuum energy, call it vacuum fluctuation, call it zero point energy, call it free energy, call it what you want, I don’t think it really matters all that much. 

There’s an inconceivable amount of energy all around us and some day we will be able to extract just a tiny fraction of it for an endless supply.

condor wrote: Although most examples of faith seem suspicious, can you not have faith in your calculations? If we need to have evidence for everything, we will need to have simulations for myriads of things to the extent it will become impractical.

However if you knew from a previous proven calculation that it only took ½ litre of paint to cover a single wall in a similar room (i.e. 'evidence from experience') then you could have instantly told that you were in the wrong ball-park without having to prove your calculation empirically.

The calculation for working out how much paint you require is simply area x coverage. To check that your equation is correct there is a technique called dimensional analysis where you check that the units on the left side of an equation equals the dimensions on the right, for example: quantity of paint in litres = area in square metres x coverage in litres/square metre.  quantity of paint in litres = area in square metres x coverage in litres/square metre. correct so here you can see that the square metres/square metre cancel each other and both sides are in litres. Now if the calculation you actually used was: quantity of paint in litres = area in square metres x coverage in litres/square foot. wrong you can quickly see that the square feet/square metre does not cancel so an extra term is required to convert the coverage in litres/square foot into litres/square metre, (or alternatively the area in square metres to the area in square feet) and that is simply a matter of finding out how many square feet there are in 1 square metre: quantity of paint in litres = area in square metres x coverage in litres/square foot x (10.764 square feet / square metre).  quantity of paint in litres = area in square metres x coverage in litres/square foot x (10.764 square feet / square metre).  quantity of paint in litres = area  x coverage in litres/square foot x (10.764 square feet ) quantity of paint in litres = area  x coverage in litres x 10.764). correct and now the square metres/square metre cancel and square feet/square foot also cancel so both sides are in litres and your equation is now correct

Not only that, the dimensional analysis actually informed you of what the missing term in the equation was - in the incorrect equation the units square metre and per square foot did not cancel so to make them cancel you needed to multiply one unit by "square feet" and divide the other by "square meters" so the missing term had the units of square feet/square metre, which tells you which conversion formula to use.