[wolfgang]

Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre

How are you (and they) defining faith? If faith is the feeling of certainty in a specific belief, then the belief must come first, of course.

I would like faith to mean your already believe something. One would have faith in their beliefs. But one would not have belief in their faiths.

But if faith is a general tendency to believe in things for which there is no evidence (not including personal experience or authoritative assurance), belief follows faith. It's not necessarily blind faith unless it means believing everything (or at least everything stated by a particular authority)

This is where I think faith is not operating. To call a tendancy to believe something, as faith, doesn't seem to make it fit as a precondition to belief, for me.

In my opinion both forms of faith fall short of true validation of a belief. The former is too reliant on feelings which can very easily be misleading,

Faith coming after belief may not be only feelings. But it probably is a personal conviction or experience that lead to having the belief. Once the belief is in place, we have faith that it is true and stays true and is reliable to use for influenceing one's actions.

and the latter inhibits questioning of suggestions which could very possibly be damaging.

This form of faith, that comes before believing, I don't see how to call it faith. Or faith has two meanings. I'd like to call this pre-belief faith as blind faith. It's blind because the belief is not really operating. We don't have the experience or personal conviction that something it true. And then we could end up following some path that doesn't question or get brain washed even, ha?