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The best starting point, before digging into subjective human associations with the heavily-loaded word, is reviewing the very simple dictionary definitions of faith .
The word faith has various uses; its central meaning is equivalent to " belief", " trust" or " confidence". As such, the object of faith can be either a person (or even an inanimate object or state of affairs) or a proposition (or body of propositions, such as a religious credo).
In religious contexts, "faith" has several different meanings. Sometimes, it means loyalty to one's religion. It is in the latter sense in which one can speak of, for example, "the Catholic faith" or "the Islamic faith." For creedal religions, faith also means that one accepts the religious tenet s of the religion as true. For non-creedal religions, faith often means that one is loyal to a particular religious community.
Sometimes, faith means a commitment to a relationship with God. In this case, "faith" is used in the sense of "fidelity." Such a commitment need not be blind or submissive. For many Jews, for example, the Hebrew Bible and Talmud depict a committed but contentious relationship between God and the Children of Israel. For quite a lot of people, faith or the lack thereof, is an important part of their identities. E.g. a person will identify him or herself as a Muslim or a skeptic.
Many religious rationalists, as well as non-religious people, criticise implicit faith as being irrational. In this view, belief should be restricted to what is directly supportable by logic or evidence. Taken as a religious viewpoint itself, this worldview is universist.
Sometimes, faith means a belief in the existence of God, and can be used to distingish individual belief in God from belief in God within religion. However it can also be used in context of belief in God within religions. Many HindusThis article is about the Hindu religion; for other meanings of the word, see Hindu (disambiguation). Aum, the most sacred syllable and quintessential symbol of Hinduism, represents the first manifestation of the unmanifest Brahman. Hinduism Santana Dharm, Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that there is adequate historical evidence of God's existenceExistence is an ontological topic par excellence. In Anglo-American philosophy (this article will have to be augmented with summaries of work in other traditions), probably the most widely-asked question about it is what sort of concept it is, or what fun and God's interactionGenerally, an interaction is a kind of action which occurs as two or more objects have an effect upon one another. The word is sometimes used synonymously with " transaction"; in some cases, a difference between the two should be distinguished. Examples i with human beings. As such, there is no need for "faith" in God in the sense of belief against or despite evidence; rather, they hold that evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that God certainly exists, and that particular beliefs, concerning who or what God is and why God is to be trusted, are vindicated by evidence and logic. For people in this category, "faith" in God simply means "belief that one has knowledgeKnowledge is the awareness and understanding of facts, truths or information gained in the form of experience or learning. Knowledge is an appreciation of the possession of interconnected details which, in isolation, are of lesser value. Knowledge is a te of God". It is logically impossible that all these different religions with their mutually contradictory beliefs can simultaneously be true. Therefore the majority of believers have faith in a belief system which is in some ways false, which they have difficulty describing at least. This is disputed though by some religious traditions especially in HinduismThis article is about the Hindu religion; for other meanings of the word, see Hindu (disambiguation). Aum, the most sacred syllable and quintessential symbol of Hinduism, represents the first manifestation of the unmanifest Brahman. Hinduism Santana Dharm who hold the view that the several different faiths are just aspects of the ultimate truth that the several religions have difficulty to describe and understand. They see the different religions as just different paths to the same goal. This does not explain away all logical contradictions between faiths but these traditions say that all seeming contradictions will be understood once a person has an experience of the Hindu concept of mokshaThis article is about a religious term. See Moksha (disambiguation) for other meanings. Moksha ( Sanskrit: liberation or Mukti ( Sanskrit: release refers, in general, to liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. In higher Hindu philosophy, it is see.
What is believed concerning God, in this sense, is at least in principle only as reliable as the evidence and the logic by which faith is supported.
Finally, some religious believer s -- and many of their critics -- often use the term "faith" as the affirmationAn affirmation (from Latin affirmare to assert) is the declaration that something is true. In logic, an affirmation is a positive judgment, the union of the subject and predicate of a proposition. In law, an affirmation is a solemn declaration allowed to of belief without an ongoing testThe words test and testing have many meanings: Testing or experimentation is part of the scientific method, to verify or falsify an already formed expectation with an observation. In manufacturing, quality control testing is a procedure designed to test t of evidence, and even despite evidence apparently to the contrary. Most Jews, Christians and Muslims admit that whatever particular evidence or reason they may possess that God exists and is deserving of trust, is not ultimately the basis for their believing. Thus, in this sense faith refers to belief beyond evidence or logical arguments, sometimes called "implicit faith". Another form of this kind of faith is fideism: one ought to believe that God exists, but one should not base that belief on any other beliefs; one should, instead, accept it without any reasons at all. Faith in this sense, grounded simply in the sincerity of faith, belief on the basis of believing, is often associated with Søren Kierkegaard for example, and some other existentialist religious thinker s; his views are presented in Fear and Trembling. William Sloane Coffin counters that faith is not acceptance without proof, but trust without reservation.