Quote:
Isnīt faith based on the unseen, not the seen?
No, faith is not BASED on the unseen- the unseen is the objective of the faith.

For instance, you placed your faith in the chair you're sitting in when you sat down. Until you sat down, you believed that the chair would hold you. You based your faith, at least in part, on what you could see- a chair that you evaluated with your eye was at least strong enough to hold you. You didn't, I presume, sit on a house made of cards.

Now you probably had pretty good reason to believe that the chair would hold you based on your observation and past experience with chairs (possible even the one in question), but you weren't actually exercising faith until you sat down. At that point the rubber met the road and you found out if your faith was misplaced. If there was a weakness in the chair that your observeation didn't detect, the chair might have broken and you'd have found your faith misplaced.

Faith is not believing blindly in something against reason. It is taking what you do know, through observation and experience, and trusting in what is not seen based on that knowledge. Or in other words, it is trusting in the unseen based on what is seen.
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-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.