Faith
FAITH, in probably the best-known definition of it, is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." Although this definition itself comes from the Christian scriptures, specifically from the anonymous epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament, it can, mutatis mutandis, be applied across a broad spectrum of religions and religious traditions. Whether or not the term faith appears in those traditions is, at least in part, a matter of how various terms are translated into modern Western languages. More importantly, however, faith is used, even in Judaism and Christianity (where it has been the most successfully domesticated), to cover an entire cluster of concepts that are related to one another but are by no means identical. If there is truth in the contention that faith is the abstract term with which to describe that attitude of the human mind and spirit of which prayer is the concrete expression, then one or more of these concepts may probably be said to play some part in every religious tradition, and in that sense at least, "faith" may likewise be said to appear there. Hence an enumeration of these discrete concepts, each of them in some way a synonym for faith, may serve to provide, if not a logical definition, then at any rate a cumulative description, of it.
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