Is your belief religious? Your faith from experience?

Question: Do you know who your God is, be it the Almighty or the almighty dollar?

It’s real important, in the real world, to know what your definition of God is. That you believe in God has no moral attachment; what you believe your God to be (and allow) does. People live and die, often nastily, over those three little letters.

So, what about being religious without God? I’m thinking of something Einstein said – and by the way, to head some folks off at the pass, he made emphatically clear his lack of belief in a personal God; he was a “deeply religious nonbeliever.”

That statement has resonated with me for a long time. I first read Einstein’s “Essays in Humanism” perhaps three decades ago, and was struck by (among many things) his strong identity as a Jew, without the trappings of belief.

And, all these years later, I’ve come to at least some provisional conclusions about the whole “belief thing.” Namely, that it’s not only unnecessary to have belief in order to be religious but that, the more one only believes, the less likely it is that religious feeling is even involved.

I’ve been searching for a way to express the difference between being religious and having belief, and the word “religionist” seems perfect. As in, “The religionists’ rigid belief has sucked real religious feeling right out of their religion.”

Which leads to the distinction between belief and faith, and then to the difference between faith and knowledge. And to the difference between what you know, what you have faith in, and what you simply believe.

So, just what is the difference between faith and belief? I’ll say that beliefs are the basic assumptions about reality that are, rightly or wrongly, taken for granted, i.e., one’s worldview – put simply, what you were told while growing up.

Sunday school religion, so to speak. Going to church. Being a good, God-fearing Christian, if you were raised Lutheran, like me.

To continue using my little lexical contribution, “religionist” belief obviously carries some weight, which I’ll call conviction. Part of that conviction is the accompanying belief that one’s God is the “right” one, the real God.

Faith, however, is based upon something other than belief. I’ll call it, for lack of better words, a “spiritual apprehension.” Faith derives from an actual experience. I’ll say that belief is outer, faith inner.

And since one may believe without faith, one may have faith without belief. But there’s usually that automatic cultural conflation: belief, faith, religion, religious, God. It’s hard to even think otherwise, isn’t it?

But maybe the question should be, “What is the actual faith experience experience of?”

Historically speaking, if you were a desert dweller, you attached one god to your faith experience. From the rain forest? Then you’d have an entire panoply of spirits and sprites involved.

But some need no referent whatsoever: “Deeply religious nonbelievers.”

So, to sum up, belief is an assumption and faith is an experience, and it’s a shame that the two are often conflated: the faithful believe and the believers have faith.

But there’s still that missing word – namely, knowledge. I’ll just call knowledge a valid assumption, a belief that is congruent with reality.

Religionist belief is nothing of the kind. It’s an allegiance. It’s a mindset. It’s a prejudice. It’s an acceptance of something as true with no evidence. Belief, at bottom, is blind trust in an absolute.

And absolutism is deadly. (Provisionally speaking, of course.) Just count the bodies.