(May 24, 2015 at 3:08 pm)Anima Wrote: I think it is the difference between the form and the function:
Belief is the form and faith is the function.
Agreed.
(May 24, 2015 at 3:08 pm)Anima Wrote: As such, the act of accepting information without sufficient "proof" is faith. The combination, correlation, and/or integration of that information is a belief.
Don't agree.
Faith isn't about being naive or gullible, is it? But what you say is pretty much true of all institutional religion today. Institutional religions point to primary religious experience only in the past tense. It is something people already did so that the church can concern itself only with understanding what that primary experience revealed about what is required of each individual today. That is why "faith" as it is understood within institutional religion is necessarily a bastardization of the term. True "faith" is concerned with primary religious experience, the encounter between each individual and that which gives rise to meaning. Institutional religion saves the individual from the associated risks of the encounter so that it can control the form of its interpretation. My Exhibit 2 (post number 4) included only the last sentence of the quote. Here is the bulk of the paragraph before along with the next paragraph including everything leading up to that quote.
Quote:The Christian religion has always been an apologetic religion, in that it assumes a primary spiritual experience at its core, but uses the philosophy and the psychology of the times in which to clothe that experience so that one can make sense out of it and come to terms with what is demanded of the person in light of the experience. In the early days of Christianity, the Church used Greek and Roman thought to help amplify and illustrate the essential experience of faith. What was clear then and now is that the focus was on the experience of grace and faith, and not in the amplification or philosophical language used to help people understand their experience. Experience was primary and understanding was secondary.
So what are the clothes by which we understand this primary experience today? More and more people are turning to the mythic structure and language of depth psychology for understanding the essential core experience of life. However, one big problem then and now is that a great many people put their faith in the philosophical or psychological understanding, and not in the essential experience behind or underneath the explanations about faith and the experience that brought about the state of faith from the state of un-faith. Faith is not the state of believing but the state of trusting in the source that makes faith possible.
