Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Andrew. I feel that a lot of confusion could be cleared up if people learned to differentiate "faith" from "belief." They are generally seen as the same thing, but they are not.

Faith is intuitive and nonverbal. It is essentially saying "yes" to life, while knowing full well that we will never understand it. Beliefs are the culturally determined linguistic constructs we co-create to rationalize our faith. And while faith is a universal attribute of all conscious beings, beliefs are as individual as fingerprints. And so belief systems--religions--are essentially culturally rooted languages for sharing, discussing, and propagating our faith. Confusion arises, however, when such linguistic constructs become an identity marker--a casus belli; pitting "us" against "them." Exhibit A of such tribal "My way or no way" belief systems are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Neither indigenous tribal religions nor far Eastern wisdom traditions like Buddhism ever suffered from the delusion that beliefs and faith are the same thing. As Alfred Korzybsky said, "The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named." Religious beliefs are the map; faith is the territory.