By the Buddhas and the Gods, before this degrades into a sludge fight....let me see whether a middle ground exist here.
First and foremost Sammie( Shan, I will address you later ), I have to reassert that I agree with you that reality, in it's purest form is near immutable. What I meant by perception and reality is this.
Reality, or what we call reality, has to be PERCEIVED by us, first by our sense organs, than by our own mental interpretation of reality, on a biological, psychological and intellectual level.
The first you cannot change barring nanotechnology, the second can be changed on many levels. As I told you before, the story of the bogeyman in the closet, to you as a child, such a concept is actually real . Therefore, DARKNESS in the closet to a child=bogeyman. While DARKNESS in it's essence may not have changed from the vantage point of reality, to you and I, darkness have changed. This is our perception of reality, and hence to us, reality. What we call REALITY, both you and I, happens to be nothing more than our PERCEPTION of it, and that includes our tummy ache. Though we are IMMERSED in reality, our idea of what is called reality ultimately comes from our sense and interpretation of it. This is where existance and perception are intertwined.
A good example is this Sammie. Tell me, how many colours are there in a rainbow?
If your answer is 7, what are you basing it on?
Your vision? But is this true?
Yes, because what you see shows you there are 7 colors.
But what do a bee see?
A bee sees one color.
Is it true there is only one color?
True again.
What would a UV perceiving being see?
At least 36 spectrums.
Is this true? True again.
YET, are there actually COLORS to the rainbow?
The answer, to ultimate reality, NONE!! What is color but our perception of how certain spectrum of the EM fields operate? To NATURE. a rainbow will be perceived as an EM field bending in water.
Yet, if Nature wants to be pedantic, there is no EM field, only pulses of photons, and no water, only little energy balls repelling each other. And even worse, Nature might perceive this little balls as nothing again, mere blips in the space time continuum.
So what we call reality, in this case, we limit it to the sense organ, is dependent upon our perception. When we say, " That is a rainbow," we are in fact branding a reality based upon our perception.
No, to Shan's belief in a deity or not, again it is her perception of reality which differs from yours. Both of you at the same time are immersed in the same reality. However, your perception of reality are now different. Take for example, I throw you and Shan into say, a very frigid, cold stream side somewhere in, I don't know, Iceland.
If I know Shan well, she will jump in ecstactic delight at the sight of a river and the cold and the frigidness and will probably go into rapturous delight.
Why, her perception of reality tells her that this is a wonderful place.
I doubt you and most people will do the same. I bet you we will go about hunting for a nice warm shed.
Likewise, is her belief in a God, which is dependent upon how she perceives reality.
AND by the way, even this statement I make is my perception of reality, which in no way is close to, I am 100% certain, how ultimate reality truly is.
Shan:-
Faith has not waned, we just have faith in our other perception of what we perceive will bring us satisfaction.
Really, not believing doesn't make anything cease to exist you just fool yourself into thinking that it doesn't. Seriously.... I've seen many 'unpleasent' things in my life that deal with the superntural and no non-belief could have saved me then. So I guess, on the religious side thats where my faith comes back into play. Faith that I have the greater strength and gerater power. Faith that I'm surround by angels ready for battle, faith that God's head is turned my way.
