What is the difference between belief and faith?
It’s an interesting question.
On face value, it appears as though they are both fundamentally the same.
I believe that something’s true.
Or I have faith that something’s true.
In both cases, I am taking something to be true that I am not 100% certain about.
To be certain about something, means I know it in my direct experience in this moment.
Anything short of that, cannot be said to be known. Epistomology is the study of what can be known and can bear that out for us.
For example, I know that I am breathing right now, because I can sense it.
I don’t know, in this moment, if God’s real, because I can’t sense it, but I do think that God is real.
All right, so belief and faith have some common ground between them.
What is the difference then?
In my opinion, faith is having had a taste of something and knowing it’s real to your bones. Unshakeably so.
Belief is taking what someone else tells you to be true as fact, without sufficient evidence.
They are different. And in an important way.
I have faith that we are all one. I have faith that awakening to our true nature is possible for human beings. I have faith that it is possible to love deeply. I have faith that we can all raise our consciousness levels.
I have experienced or tasted these things and so when I say them, I’m not believing them to be true because someone else told me about them. I’m believing them because I’ve known them directly.
In this moment, as I sit here and write this blog post, these things are not known directly in this moment. Right now, I hold them in memory alone. But I hold them in such a way that they are unshakeably true. It would be very difficult for someone to convince me otherwise, given those experiences.
And I think that’s a valuable distinction to make.
Why am I writing an entire blog post about this?
Well, I think it’s important in this day and age that we examine how we make sense in the world. Very often, people swallow opinions and half-truths and justifications and understandings whole from others without actually checking them out. This results in a society that is divided into camps, where tribes can’t communicate with each other, where holding the middle ground is to be seen as being a traitor to both sides, where what you believe becomes more important than who you are.
If we are to heal this divide, heal ourselves and heal humanity, we need to start developing our own understandings from our own direct experience and not buying things that don’t line up with our own direct experience.
This is fundamental to being a seeker.
The Buddha used to say, don’t believe anything I tell you, check it out for yourself.
Yet, how many people actually do that?
It takes times and effort and energy and commitment to go through that process. It takes elbow grease and a willingness to get messy and a degree of comfort with not knowing. It takes being courageous enough to change our closely held ideas about the world when they’re proven to be incorrect. That process can be painful. But the opposite is even more painful. To live in delusion and suffer accordingly.
What do you believe?
And what do you have faith in?
And why?
Can you explain it to me?
If you can’t, maybe that’s something worth delving into a little deeper?