9/9/04
Mr. Sciuto
Faith Essay
Faith is defined as having belief, confidence, and trust in someone or something. However one must take into consideration both doubt and risk. Who and what you have faith in models your choices and lifestyle. Recognizing your bias and not acting on it when making informed decisions. Having faith in others and something is important to living a healthy balanced life.
Real faith is not an unconditional, blind, and unfounded belief and trust. Faith is built like character, slowly over time it gathers strength and is constantly being reflected upon and slightly modified. To begin to have faith in something you must first gather knowledge about it, arrive at an understanding of what its principles are, and take into consideration how putting faith into this will affect your life. However most of the time when you are meeting someone for the first time you will have an unfounded but steady faith in the person to be naturally good and responsible.
Risk is involved whenever you decide to place your trust and belief into anything. There is often the possibility that your beliefs are untrue or may ask you to do something that is not actually right in the moral, practical, or logical sense. Putting your faith in the truth is hard because often times the truth is blurred by our own or others bias. We must recognize our bias and consider the facts and evidence that support or disprove our faith.
Putting your faith in someone is risky because people may be unfaithful to you, supply inaccurate information, act unjustly, and may not maintain their responsibilities to themselves or others. One will also experience doubt whenever faith is involved. This is natural and this doubt should be reflected upon and weighed against the truths you know about the thing you have faith in. Doubt has its most profound effect on faith during periods of struggle in which the mind feels that it has been deceived, abandoned, and hurt. This feeling of loss is sometimes great enough to lead people to reject their faith.
Having faith in something leads to decisions based upon reflection and perceived truth. Confidence is built upon faith and confidence in oneself leads to success through hard work. Yet to lead a balanced healthy life one cannot live secluded and must associate with other. To do this one must have faith in others and their abilities. However one must choose the correct people to put faith in because some, like Hitler and Osama Bin Laden, lead people to death and destruction. In these cases where we find something unfit for our faith we must steer clear of it and fight for justice and the truth. Faith in others will direct our choices and develop who we will be in life.