Wonderfully put.
I've read a lot of work by an Indian Jesuit priest named Anthony deMello and he talks about belief like a warm blanket. It protects you and keeps you warm and you will hold on tight to it if someone/thing tries to pull the belief off of you. You're also reluctant to get up and move from under a nice warm blanket.
I continue to come to the conclusion, in my own thinking on the topic, that faith and belief are OK. That regardless of if they're right or wrong, they serve the purpose of religion which is to get people through life. Holding onto a strong belief in damnation gives strong consequences for wrong behavior and offers a moral compass. Giving an ultimate meaning to it all in god/jesus gives people an idea of ultimate meaning to all the things they do in life.
The objective reality may be that there is no ultimate meaning to our individual lives and that we really don't have free will in any sense of the cosmos, but that hardly has application to folks busing tables or being someone's secretary who are just looking for ways to get through the day.
This is the main reason that I respect religion's role in society. So belief and faith are really good mental vehicles into which you can stick your identity/self in order to get through life. There are other options too, but these are clearly options as well.
Its an objective reality that the ideas of judgmental gods in the west are not an ultimate reality, but this doesn't matter. And this is my main problem with atheists. They're demanding that people throw their identity/self into this box without god when they may not want to. The people over there in the religious camp throw their identity/self into the god illusion. They're both doing the same thing. They both are trying to get through life.
This is why it basically says that god is as real as I am in my signature. To me, god is a metaphor. To others, he's a real being. In both cases, the statement helps the individual get through life. The only goal in the world is self preservation and survival. This is a goal for only one reason. Creatures that don't have this goal simply don't survive (obviously).
Faith and belief enable this. Having unwavering belief may allow some people to do awesome things. It may cripple them for other things. But in the end, we all die.
Faith can have a lot of different meanings while belief is less broad in my opinion. Faith is something I have. Faith is something that helps me follow the evidence wherever it leads and even when I'm not sure where its leading or if it looks like its leading me away from what I used to think was true. For others, Faith is a way that they justify their belief in a religious structure that gives them purpose in life.
Belief is belief. It's the act of holding something to be true. I like to say that I have no beliefs. I don't hold onto anything. I simply let be what is. Ask me about something and I say "well, I think this is the way it works based on what I've learned about it," but there's always the chance that I may be wrong.
For people who have beliefs, as "Long Rufus" quoted in dogma, they're going to fight and die for them because they're integral to their identity. They've cast their self/identity into a box with no exits so they're backed into a corner no matter what. That's not the case with me and other empiricists.
Good topic.
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Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
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