Difference Between Faith And Believe: Across religions, ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ have different meanings and refer to different specialized concepts. However, in the multitude of usages of the word, despite their similarities, there are a number of differences between them.
The differences lean more to the specialized usage of them within the different religious settings and how both words, epistemologically, can come to mean different things and allude to varying degrees of intensities. Here are 10 differences between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’.
Faith And Believe
Faith is trust and confidence. Its belief, compounded by being integrated with everything we understand to be proven and true, so acquiring the status of truth. To have faith in something requires more than mere belief because faith is something we might always have to rely on.
Belief is a personal choice. It’s a state of mind brought on by choosing to accept some information. The information might be unverifiable (like “there is a god”) or verifiable (like “all bees make honey”). People are fallible, so either way, it could be wrong. Belief can be temporary, changeable, or circumstantial.
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10 Remarkable Differences Between Faith And Believe
1. To refer to a religion: You often hear a person say they belong to a particular faith. Faith in this context is used to refer to a person’s religion. In this manner, we have the Christian faith, the Islamic faith, the Buddhist faith, etc.
2. By definition: By definition, faith involves ‘anticipation of expected realities without direct evidence’. By definition, a belief involves ‘trust in the reality of something based on direct evidence’.
3. Good faith: The phrase ‘in good faith is often used to refer to a situation where one carries out their obligations with a heart that purely accepts and trusting the sanctity or reason for carrying out that obligation, regardless of the discomforts it causes him/her. Hence, faith as a term carries the elements of trust and convinced obligation with it.
4. Intensity: Some religions of the world portray faith as a concept more intense and deep than belief. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, for instance, faith enables a person to ‘move mountains’.
5. Sight: The element of sight is at least a partial requirement for the attainment of belief. The saying goes ‘seeing is believing’ as an attestation to that fact. However, the element of sight is unnecessary, if not ungainly, the component of faith. However, faith is said to be demanded where sight is an impossibility or one is advised even to discard their trust in their sense of sight. The saying goes ‘faith is blind’ as an attestation to this fact.
6. Rationalization: It is a common thing to see a person attempt to rationalize his/her beliefs. To have one point to reasonable elements and build up rational arguments to support what one believes in. faith comes with no such justification. Faith is, as many practitioners put it, illogical, irrational, and unexplainable.
7. Passive Vs Active: One may have beliefs that are passive – which explains what one feels about an issue and serves as the lens through which one views the world. Faiths are no such passive concepts. It is required that one attends to the workings of one’s faith regularly. Faith is an active belief.
8. Supernatural: One’s faith is usually tied to the workings of the supernatural. In other words, many religions point that one can only access the realm of the supernatural by harnessing faith and not merely by believing in the existence of God/gods.
9. Diligence: Faith as a concept spreads into the workings of everyday and corporate living as a phenomenon representing through diligence. Hence, people, many decide to be ‘faithful’ or ‘unfaithful’ to their spouses or jobs or appointments. Many formal letters are closed off with ‘yours faithfully’ as a promise of diligence. The concept of belief carries no such connotations.
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StudentsandScholarship Team.
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