BELIEF AND HAVE FAITH DIFFERENCES....

Last night i had a good conversation, once again with the same person.. Like the conversations we had each other. I've been asked "to have faith"....and told me that there is a difference between "have faith" and "believe"...!!! i thought so, but i wanted to figure it out. 

So i had a "walk" and i found an article. Enjoy.

"We believe things with our minds. Beliefs are ideas. They are concepts. They give us a picture of reality that others can agree with or disagree with. Beliefs are thoughts that can be put into words and these words can be communicated to others. Beliefs, however, are not absolute truths. They are opinions about reality, not reality itself. In the realm of belief we can have our own opinions, others can have their opinions, and we can agree or disagree, remembering that the truth of our beliefs is relative.

Having faith in something is different than this. Faith, in a spiritual sense, does not have to do with relative truths but with absolute truths - truths that exist for all time. Faith relates us to an unvarying, underlying reality that we share in - one that we assume exists whether we believe in it or not. Unlike beliefs which are of the mind, faith is not just of the mind but of the heart as well.

Here is an example of the difference between belief and faith: We think something with our mind about God. This is our concept of God. We think, for example, that God is the creator of the Universe and that God must have had a reason for wanting to create the Universe, that is, that it was an intentional act. We can think that the reason for this act is unknown, or we can think that the reason for this act was the wish to extend love. Whichever we think, we are still in the realm of concepts. We are still in the realm of opinions.

Faith comes into play when we tell ourselves that our concepts are true - when we hold them to be true even though we don't have any proof that they are true. Then we have crossed the line. Faith is not concerned with proof. This is because faith is of the heart as well as the mind. Faith occurs not just because we think something is true, but because we want it to be true and our minds tell us that it may be true. Faith combines our heart's wish and our mind's belief into an inner affirmation that the possible is real. Faith is the affirmation of this reality.

When we have faith, we believe in the invisible. In doing this, our mind faces a clear choice between doubt and trust. Faith makes the choice to trust based on the joining of mind and heart. It makes the choice to suspend doubt and cynicism and to say "yes" to the thinking of the heart rather than to rational thinking. In place of rational thinking faith says: "I can believe in what I do not see, for it is not physical sight that gives reality to things but heart and intuition that gives reality to things." Faith is based on the willingness of the mind to side with the reality of the heart which holds that what is subjective can be equally real to what is objective, even though it may not be proveable in a physical sense. Love is like this, a subjective fact whose existence cannot be proven but whose reality is nevertheless very real.

Those who take exception to faith as a way of perceiving reality, often do so on the basis of scientific rationality. One of the most common arguments against faith is this: if you cannot see it, touch it, or feel it with your senses, you cannot know it exists. Further, if no one else but you can perceive it, then there is even less chance that it exists."