what is belief and faith? How do the rationalists distinguish between the two?

Answer 1

Rationalists are imprisoned by their obsession with reasoning and logical thinking. They are in their own cocoon and try to perceive the world outside. They do not have much of emotion, faith and what they understand in their own way they believe. Hence, they have beliefs and no faith. Faith does not look for justification. Beliefs are built on the weak foundations of shifting logic and inferences.

Answer 2

We all have beliefs. In fact, we probably have more beliefs than knowledge. There is very little that can be proven unequivocally. Most of the time, we believe what we do based on the evidence. Blind faith is when you believe in something in spite of a lack of evidence, or even in the face of contrary evidence.

A rationalist would stay away from blind faith. But some sort of faith is necessary to live your daily life. That faith, for rationalists, must be based on evidence. So for example, perhaps I cannot prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that my mother is really my mother. But I have evidence that she is. I talk like her, look a lot like her, and we share a lot of character traits. She is an honest person and there seems to be no reason she would lie about being my mother. and so on. So I believe she is my mother. In fact, I'll SAY that I even KNOW she's my mother. But this technically probably stretches the meaning of the word "to know."

So I think it all boils down to evidence, and what one considers sufficient evidence for belief.

Answer 3

"the rationalists" don't worry about either one, frankly -- it's mostly the religious zealots who endlessly debate the meaning of faith.

For us rationalists it's very simple: belief, faith, call it whatever you want, is irrelevant. I judge things on the evidence for or against them -- I don't need to have faith in anything or believe in anything, both of which imply accepting something without evidence. I either know or I don't -- and if I don't know, I'll say so.

Life is much easier that way -- you don't have to go around continually trying to justify beliefs or faith in things for which there is no evidence of any kind. You don't have to decide what part of ancient superstitious fairytales are true, or "trust" that your priest or pastor knows what he's talking about -- if there's no evidence, there's no evidence. Period. Doesn't matter what anybody else says. Show me the evidence, or don't bother talking about something.

Answer 4

Faith is to believe(accept) all that God has revealed, or made known, to us (whether we understand it entirely or not). This includes the whole body of truths which we as Christians believe.

Belief is the act of Faith. Belief is the acceptance of what another has taught or told us. To accept as truth the word of another.

Very subtle yet important distinctions. Great Question.