Belief and Faith

I had crafted a luminous append but had a failure during the posting of it! As a precuation I will copy & paste future texts to ensure that such a thing does not occur again. Highly annoying.

My Star Trek stuff about “worshipping the Son”, witty erudite bohemian intuitive insightful quips -- all gone! Ah well, such is the nature of our world :-)

But, as John Lennon said, "there is no place you can be that isn't where you're meant to be".

You said:

Belief in almost all things is a sliding scale of certainty/uncertainty,
wouldn't you say?

Yes I would agree. I was trying to put a number on the slippery vernier scale and have yet to come up with better than >50% = belief and < 50% = disbeliefs. What happens at exactly 50% I do not know, but as the Uncertainty Principle excludes such exactness from the physical world (the Euclidean "point" does not exist in the physical world) I'm not worried. Your intuitive non-mathematical treatise of it reminds me of the old Chinese proverb:

Tell me, I forget
Show me, I remember
Involve me, I understand

You said:

... is belief in God the same as faith in God?

If I rephrase to:

... is belief in X the same as faith in X?

Are the two questions the same? If so then consider the example of X being “the sexual fidelity of our wives” (ok ok, theoretical for me as I’m not married):

1. We might believe that she has always been faithful to us

2. We might have faith that she is and will always be faithful to us

3. We might believe that she is having an affair

4. We would not have faith that she is having an affair

We only have faith in things that we want to be absolutely true. And shame on your philosopher, were he worth his salt he would have advised his student to take his advice with a pinch of it. Everything appears to have the potential to be relative, including my last comment. Relative "to what" is the interesting question.

Current Song: "Scoff" -- Nirvana