Though the words faith and belief have similar meanings, there is one definite difference between them. This difference is that faith is when someone else does the thinking for you. This is the chief cause for both my admiration and disgust with most organized religions.

I have come to the aforementioned conclusion through personal experience, and not the ever popular prejudged opinion.

I was raised in the Catholic faith by parents who bordered on evangelism for it. To this day i can recite for anyone the entirety of the Catholic mass. Though now, unlike in my younger years when i learned it, I can understand the meaning behind the words. Through my elementary education I attended Catholic schools. Everything was dictated, and I was to swallow these doctrines and live by them. Thus was faith assumed strong when it was merely all that I knew. When faced with no options once can only follow the path they are led down.

However, I found a track hidden by the bushes off the designated path I had been given. Knowledge led me from the beaten trail of faith into the woods of belief where I could pick and choose my own steps. My oldest brother opened my eyes to a wide world of options in this area and encouraged me to explore further and choose for myself.

I was also in a Pentecostal youth group that I ended up preaching at weekly. I began reading about other religions and beliefs. Things like agnosticism, atheism, and religions like scientology, Faery Wicca and the doctrines behind it all. I dug into the heart of faith and returned with beliefs all my own.

Faith is trusting that what someone else tells you is true. It is a human safety net, to know something. This is the aspect that leaders of almost all religions exploit in their followers. This allows religious leader to place limits on human experience, free thoughts, and human potential. Faith allows for these small dictatorships which give you set rules for how you think, how you act, how you treat others, how you live, how and sometimes who you love, when in your life you must do things. Faith wraps people up in tightly wound, coloured packages which at the same time display them to and separate them from the world. Faith is "being led like a lamb to the slaughter", completely oblivious to your surroundings or possible outcomes.

In contrast, belief is something you find and not something you are given. It takes time and depends solely on its possessor. Belief belongs to a single person, a single mind and not to a vast crowd. It sets no limits because it needs none. Belief in its truest form allows for freedom, various experience, and for testing and changing life patterns. It lets you live and love and think openly, endlessly. It cannot be summed up in words because it is constantly changing to account and allow for new things. Belief lets you walk to your fate with your eyes open instead of clouded with what you have been conditioned to trust is true.

However, this last note dealing with facing fate is what makes me admire those with faith and not belief. These people with faith can give themselves completely to something that has just as much chance of being wrong as it does of being right. They can bravely face the evils of this world; disease, hate, war, despair, with a fire in their souls and a smile on their faces. They feel safe and happy without having to wander lost in the woods of belief until they find a clearing.. In a world of confusion and fear they know, more than they know they breath, that there is one truth, one way, and they walk surely along that one beaten path with their heads held high.

So, while I do not choose the path of faith, but wander in the woods of belief, I can still see the light glinting in the eyes of those who do. There is a difference between faith and belief, but difference is what makes us human.