is personal experience good enough? (ritual, spiritual, faith, religion)

[PureX]

[quote=roli;865999]

Faith is absolutely a product of knowledge and experience,indirectly,it may not be a present knowledge or experience,but it certainly is based on passed knowledge and experience, otherwise, how would we ,deposit money in the bank,eat at a restaurant, parachute, drive a car etc. if it were not based on a past experience and past knowledge.
Mind you ,we assume a whole lot in most, if not all instances throughout a given day, without actually having the immediate knowledge to support the facts that our money is safe or our food at our favorite diner is not toxic.
However people want to look at it,we do operate in faith for our very existence.
The question is ,why is it so difficult for many to comprehend that God would ask us to have faith in Him, I mean,if we operate in faith on a daily basis,it's no wonder he says, without faith in God it's impossible to please him.
So ,we all have the ability to have faith in him because we have faith in pretty much every facet of our lives.
So faith really is a assumption,guess,having confidence,trusting in what our past experience was.
If my breaks failed one day,I think I would be more conscious of checking them more often,even though they failed ,I still won't check them every time I drive ,that would be an inconvenience,so I walk out faith again,and again,and again.

When I say that faith is not the product of knowledge or experience, I mean that with knowledge and experience we can formulate reasonable and reliable probabilities. And as we obtain more and more reliable probability, we need less and less faith to make our choices as we move forward in life. Conversely, as our ability to formulate reliable probabilities decreases, due to a lack of knowledge and/or experience, then we find ourselves having to rely more on faith as an alternative to that reasonable probability.

And by faith I mean our hope for an outcome that we do not otherwise have reason to expect, AND our actions based on that hope. Faith is the decision to act according to a hoped-for outcome, in response to not having a reasonable experience-based probability for that outcome.

I agree that we act on faith much of the time, and every day. And I agree that acting on the conveyed knowledge and experience of others is to some degree an act of faith. But what I wanted to point out is not that we must live by knowledge OR faith, but that to the degree one is missing, the other must fill in.

[lilithu]

Originally Posted by Mike182

my religion is based on my personal experiences of the supernatural, or at least what i perceive to be supernatural. i have images and visions in which i communicate with deity figures, i physically feel a spiritual connection with what i perceive to be dis-incarnate entities.... is this subjective, personal experience a good enough basis for faith?

As a Unitarian Universalist, I believe that personal experience is the most authentic basis for faith.