Jerry..in my head, 'faith' comes after belief...sort of a subset. If I 'believe' in something, then what do I presume follows from that? What about my belief am I confident in? One can 'believe' in a Supreme Being or Universal Spirit (much like Little Hawk refers to, I'd imagine), but have NO 'faith' about what this implies. (I have met a number of people who DO claim they believe in a 'creator', but have no idea what one should do about it!)

I noticed a very similar semantic difficulty in the recent case of the Alabama judge who had the 10 commandments monument installed. When interviewed, he kept using the phrase "I have the right to 'acknowlege' God..."....which supposes that the issue of whether there IS a god is not even debatable. Implicit in the wording is not only his belief, but also his 'faith' about what God wants and what we should DO. He had no problem moving from his 'strong belief', which he felt personally as 'revealed truth', to the position that since (not 'if', since) it WAS truth, it should be inflicted on ..ummm..'shared with' everyone...and that makes a sort of awkward sense, huh? I would presume that the ex-justice could see very little distinction between faith, belief and 'knowlege'...at least in religious matters.

(if pressed, I would argue, at least to get the discussion moving, that faith is 'about' a belief or set of interlocked beliefs)

does that make any sense?