What does faith mean to you?
Here’s my favourite definition, by Alan Watts:
“Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”
Pagan Roots: Reclaiming concepts of the sacred will be published by 1000Volt Press in January 2025 and available from all online stores.
Contemporary Paganism has sought to recover some concepts that were lost or rejected in past centuries, but has ignored or rejected others that were absorbed into Christian discourse. Can we reclaim some of these terms and recover their original meanings?
Check out my YouTube video, Reclaiming Pagan words: Faith for more.
Dowsing for Divinity 
3 responses to “What does “faith” mean to you?”
Hmm.
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I don’t think that definition of “faith” is accurate at all, I’m afraid.
What you have described is a scientific perspective, in which evidence is weighed and beliefs changed accordingly.
“Faith” is, indeed, holding on to a wished-for belief, evidence notwithstanding. People cite “faith” as justification for behavior and their articulated values and cosmologies.
Faith is the opposite of open-mindedness.
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So the whole idea here was that we can move away from mainstream definitions of terms … but while doing that, one would need to specify that we are not talking about “blind faith”.
In older usages of the term faith, it meant trust. Sadly it’s been hijacked by fundamentalists to mean blind faith and resisting changing one’s mind in response to evidence.
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