Faith and God

The axis: faith as a forced wager, the strength of life, the discipline of a
method, a metaphysics of plenty — or an instrument, a symptom, and silence.

Faith as wager and strength of life

Pascal (pascal) — God is hidden and unprovable, neutrality impossible: you are already staked; faith enters through action and habit. Grounding: pari, sokrytyy-bog, vera-vkhodit-cherez-privychku, nado-parit.
Tolstoy (tolstoy) — faith is the strength of life; to know God and to live are one and the same; test faith by the believer's life and separate truth from falsehood in the tradition. Grounding: vera-sila-zhizni, znat-boga-i-zhit-odno-i-to-zhe, otdelyay-istinu-ot-lzhi-v-predanii.
Ignatius of Loyola (ignatius) — man is created for an end; faith is ordered by a method: discernment of spirits, examination of conscience, election made from equilibrium. Grounding: nachalo-i-osnovanie, razlichenie-dukhov, vybor-iz-ravnovesiya.

God as substance and ally of the work

Wattles (wattles) — God is Thinking Substance seeking expression through man's desire; faith and purpose are working instruments of getting rich. Grounding: zhelanie-est-bog-ishchushchiy-vyrazheniya, bezformennaya-substantsiya, vera-i-tsel.
Franklin (franklin) — the blessing of heaven is a safeguard against complacency; religion is valued by its usefulness and by works of doing good to man. Grounding: blessing-of-heaven, doing-good-to-man.

Impersonal source, measure, and means

Laozi (laozi) — the Tao is the nameless source and law, not a personal God; he who knows it acts by non-action, not by prayer. Grounding: dao, wuming, ziran.
Confucius (confucius) — Heaven and its decree are the frame of duty, not a matter for speculation: serve men before you serve the spirits. Grounding: tian, ming.
Goethe (goethe) — piety is a means, not an end; before the Inscrutable one stands in reverence while remaining with the phenomena. Grounding: nabozhnost-sredstvo-ne-tsel, neispovedimoe, ostavaysya-pri-fenomenakh.

Faith as symptom

Le Bon (lebon) — every conviction of a crowd assumes a religious form — including "rational" and atheistic ones. Grounding: ubezhdenie-tolpy-vsegda-religioznoe, religious-form-of-conviction.
Nietzsche (nietzsche) — the very will to truth and morality itself fall under genealogical suspicion: whose fear produced this "holy"? Grounding: volya-k-istine, boyazn-mat-morali.

Axis of dispute: Pascal against Tolstoy — the wager and dogma against the faith
of the people, tested by life; Wattles against Epictetus and Tolstoy — a God
who delivers riches against renunciation; Le Bon and Nietzsche against all
believers — faith as mechanism and symptom.