Belief is a matter of character. Faith comes out of fear. Fear of dying. You can be the smartest person in all universes but still be a coward.
Discussion
That’s a bit too neologic for me.
belief is how one makes sense of the world around us — everyone believes (has a worldview) and very few can articulate what they believe. But it’s revealed by their actions.
Faith is best understood as faithfulness, we still have the meaning for marriage (a faithful marriage) but religious faith has in modern times been misconstrued as an intellectual affirmation— which is completely incorrect and ahistoric. Faith is about commitment to something bigger than yourself and your vanities.
Christians don’t fear death and are willing to die for their faith — speaking truth even if it means death. Because what they fear is not nihilistic death, they fear the judgment of God based on the morality written on their heart.
You lost me at the beginning “belief is how one makes sense of the world around us”. Totally not true.
We use supernatural beliefs to make sense of things we can’t explain yet. Give it a few years in every case and we always change belief for knowledge.
Sorry, I meant that by definition — that’s just a simplified definition of “belief”, what’s true (what’s real) and what’s not. That’s just the standard definition of “belief”, it can be supernatural or natural or mundane or axiomatic or whatever, belief is just a belief.
Knowledge is not self justifying, belief is required. You can’t have knowledge of something that you don’t believe in, what Aristotle defined as “justified true belief”.
Psychologically, the source of what you think of as knowledge is effectively your god, that is, the first principle (or the God archetype if you’re into Jung). For naturalists this is reason and empiricism — but there’s a reason (pun intended) that naturalists only exist in Christian cultures.
For some simple examples, there is no natural explanations for truth, goodness, beauty, or even numbers nor mathematics — we refer to these as transcendent categories. They’re real, and we can have knowledge about them, but only with Christian presuppositions about knowledge, outside of a Christian epistemology it’s all just word games (as postmodernists are want to point out). Our cultural bias is so thoroughly shaped by these Christian presuppositions we don’t even see it, like water to a fish, we just act like these things are obvious (but there’s a reason this only emerges through Christendom)
You tried really hard but none of that offers proof of a god, not even a justifiable theory of a god.
Trying hard is irrelevant. I could just as well be describing a mathematical proof, the soundness doesn’t rest in persuasion.
You’re directly assuming you understand what proof is, what truth is — while demonstrating you have no idea and couldn’t even explain what I just said.
In your worldview, what is truth? What is justification for knowledge? Or he’s an easy one, what is good? How do you know something is good or bad? Right or wrong?
My point is that you do have one, but you have no idea what that is and clearly have no idea what people mean by God.
Haha you try too hard to convince yourself of “your truth”. When you tell people they have no idea you are really talking to yourself haha. You’re so afraid haha.
There is no “your truth” or “my truth”
There is only THE truth
And truthfully, the thing I fear most, and fear so deeply that it’s the only thing I do fear is God at the day of judgment.
“Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”
~ Matthew 7:22-23