śraddhā [faith, faith in goodness, respect, devotion]
Faith is a common idea for most of us. It’s at the center of all religious and spiritual practices because religious and spiritual practices invite us to think and act on the basis of things we cannot be sure of.
Faith is typically about knowledge, about we know and don’t know. But it also invites us to make assumptions about what knowledge is, and to assume that the having this knowledge is better than not having it.
Faith in our modern sense means setting aside rational scepticism or doubt about what we know until a later time when that knowledge can be tested scientifically. Faith in this sense means knowledge that is only meaningful if it can be verified by science.
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