An example of something “I believe”.
The word belief and its verb, believe, have become freighted with religious overtones even though belief requiring faith and belief based on some observations, evidence, etc. are entirely different. So let me give an example of something I believe and something I have faith in.
I believe administrators keep teachers busy and are reluctant to let them go to conferences because they don’t want teachers to have time to start thinking about the processes around them, to question them, to reflect.
The evidence that could turn this belief into at least an interpretation if not a fact is to find a passage in a textbook or class notebook for admins saying, “Keep teachers occupied with busy work so they don’t have time to reflect on their work.”
Faith is something I’ve always associated with “believing” in something that has no evidence. This troubled me because while I had no interest in any revealed religion or desert religion, I was very interested in Buddhism and attracted to it. Yet in Buddhist writings they kept talking about faith. Then one day I was reading a book by Chogyam Trungpa and in the first paragraph of a chapter I read that Buddhists have faith that everyone can reach enlightenment; that is the only faith required.
That hit me because I do have that faith. I think it is the thing that differentiates liberals from conservatives: we have faith or we believe that people have goodness in them as well as a capacity for bad. That is why we keep advocating social programs and so forth. I’ll talk later about what conservatives believe but suffice it to say they believe man is born evil, in sin, as they say.