I spilled milk on my computer

I hear people say that they have a hard time with the concept of faith. It seems that when it comes to believing in God they don't like the idea that they have to take certain things on faith. The 'secular' world seems to run on certainty (and sometimes it seems like religion is starting to lean that way as well) and on tests that can be proven. No one wants to deal with having faith. The problem I have with that notion is time and money. First, the easy one: Money. If you go to a store and buy something, then you are exhibiting a great deal of faith because the money used for that purchase has no value on its own. Think of it - a piece of oddly manufactured paper (they apparently use old blue jeans!) is exchanged for something and everyone accepts it. The same paper with a different colour and number on it is worth more or less despite the fact that it is basically exactly the same. If you don't have cash, you use your credit card, something that takes even more faith because that is telling the business that they will be given a predetermined amount of money which you will pay off later. Electronic banking means that actual money never need be used, leaving people with numbers on a computer screen or account print out. Money, without faith, is meaningless. We have faith that the number we see means something and that it has value. All it would take is for enough people to decide that the bits of paper with numbers on it don't mean anything at all and the world's economy would collapse. Since that would be a bad idea, however, most people continue to buy into the faith based money system. Before money, people traded goats for camels, cattle for women, and spices for services. That made sense because it was something being traded for something. Currency is nothing more than a system of faith. As for time, that is a bit more tricky because time exists. The earth rotates, the moon waxes and wanes, and people grow older. Because we are stuck in the dimension we are in, only able to access time in a going forward manner, we can say that time exists. However, why are there sixty minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day? Why do some months have 31 days, some 30, and one only 28 or 29? Why does the calendar have a leap year every four years? It's completely arbitrary. Every day is roughly equal if you just follow the moon and the sun - but we could make each hour ten minutes long, each minute forty seconds long, and each second two hours long (please don't check the math on that) and if everyone agreed, then that is what time would be. Daily cycles and monthly cycles are the most constant time we have, but if we followed those, then the year as we know it would change. A year is not exactly 365 days long (hence leap years), so January would eventually be in the middle of summer and chaos would reign. Unless, by faith, we accepted that time worked differently than we do now. Time exists, but how we measure it takes faith, takes believing in something we cannot see (though we can experience). Everyone who has ever looked at a clock or bought a clock lives by faith, even as they reject the idea of believing in a God by faith. That's my take on the matter.

Also, Nettle.