I often talk to people who consider "faith" and "belief" to be the same thing. For them, "faith" just includes all the things that have not yet been understood by science. That would mean that faith and belief are two endpoints of the same spectrum--one refers to things that are known, the other to things that are unknown.
That's not how I would put it.
“Belief” is like watching a movie where you already know the ending. Sure, you can still appreciate the story and how its put together, but its never quite the same as when you are hanging on the edge of your seat, ever fiber of your being in anticipation and rooting for the good guys to win. This is "faith".
To reduce this drama, many people want to make everything a “known” quantity. They have everything boxed into doctrines or non-doctrines. This includes people with a strict fundamentalism who hold many religious doctrines literally, as well as those who work hard to debunk the literalness of everything. What they end up doing is robbing themselves of faith itself.
Faith is not against assumptions and trust--in fact, it depends on those very things, though they can be elusive, too. Its not even against answers, but there is something about faith that is--by definition--hanging suspended between what is known and what is unknown. The ultimate trust fall.
I was thinking of writing an entry on my blog describing my disgust with fundamentalism of any kind--including atheist. There are what I call "fundametalist atheists" out there who are, for reasons I cant explain, dead set on punching holes through the spiritual person's faith just to prove them wrong... I always have to ask myself to what purpose these groups want to do that... As an atheist, I never found a home with these people... I could never understand why someone would want to try to disprove so whole-heartedly someone's faith, which provides them comfort. This mentality just boggles the mind. But the fundametalist religious people will do the same thing in the opposite direction, going to all lengths to prove that every word of their docterine is correct, even closing their ears to scientific discoveries so that they don't have to face the fact that their document might not be 100% factual.
ReplyDeleteI think faith has a little bit of insecurity built into its definition. To me, there's always a little bit of "I hope what I believe is true" mixed in it. Or maybe that's because that's how my faith is.
I dont think faith is unwavering for anyone, though. Even good people of faith question their faith from time to time. Hopefully, in the process of questioning, your faith is a little stronger. For me, it's always a little more hopeful.
I agree, I think if everything is too comfortable and you are too confident in what you believe, you may not be really living in faith as well as you could. Faith always has some element of danger.
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