Faith

Faith is a mind of belief and trust. When you trust someone blindly, you can say you have faith in them. For instance, you have faith in God or like some of your friends whom you love dearly. Now faith not only stems from trust, but your sincerity, loyalty, and depth of character also cause others to have faith in you. While faith has various definitions in different realms, in religion, it’s a completely different thing. Faith in religion is something that’s taken for granted the most.

You can have conditional faith not only in someone close to your heart but also in someone who may be in power. For instance, many people have faith in Trump. They expect him to be fair and just in running the United States of America. However, this faith is contingent on how well he performs or how responsible he is towards taking care of his people. Also, this power of his is conditional. It will cease someday when some other president gets elected. It’s sometimes outside the human capacity to understand faith completely. It has a profound power that takes years to develop.

Sometimes this kind of trust goes beyond your ability to recognize because you just don’t know what the outcome is going to be. But somehow, faith in religion is different because it was created thousands of years. That’s the religion’s faith, the strongest and oldest faith we have in the world now. For instance, the longest and oldest religion now is Hinduism, back over ten thousand years. The second longest is Muslim, and the third longest is Buddhism which dates back over 2500 years. Then there has been Christianism for over 2000 years, as you know.

For Christians, it has many branches like Catholic, protestant. Similarly, Buddhism also has many different branches, like Hinayana, the original branch of Buddhism, then the newer branch called Mahayana. Hinayana, the original Buddhism branch, can be found nowadays in Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, as well as India. Others like China, Vietnam, Japan, and Taiwan belong to Mahayana Buddhism, and we also have Tibetan is another branch of Buddhism.

Tibet Buddhism is still Mahayana Buddhism. However, Tibetan Buddhism has a higher structure compared to Hinayana than other Mahayana Buddhism. Hinayana Buddhism normally has an extremely complex management structure. For example, Thailand’s Hinayana Buddhism has a highly competent structure. They have a monk king who will manage everything throughout the structure.

Coming back to discussing faith in religion, we, as children, adopt a religion that our family follows. It’s something that has been embedded in their minds for a long time. Although their mind wanting to switch to another religion, after growing up, they would always stay close to the religion taught by their family. Therefore, it gets difficult for them to adopt another religion later in life. If your parents follow Hinduism, you are going to be Hindu for the rest of your life. If the parents are Christians, they are going to stay Christians for the rest of their life. Also, it’s completely normal to have families follow different traditions. For instance, my uncle follows Buddhism, is quite different from his wife’s family, which follows Christianity.

When they decided to get married, they were aware of the fact that their faiths would become a hurdle in their way. However, after fighting for many years, they were able to tie the knot. Both of them didn’t want to change their religion, so they decided not to let their faiths get into their marriage life, and it didn’t. As parents, they decided that if the wife bears a son, he would be a Buddhist, while if she bears a daughter, she would be a Christian. The kind of religion a child inherits solely depends on their parents. They can make informed decisions about what religious path they would follow, or maybe they can also leave this decision up to themselves.

Trust

What about trust? Normally you would say trust must be built. It’s not given. But did you know in reality, trust in religion is deep-rooted, and it was built a long time ago before now?

For many religions, it has been built for thousands of years. Well, of course, there are some good, and there are some bad experiences in the past that you can see clearly in books nowadays. However, the essential point here is about faith. I would say something about religious faith. Most people don’t ever change their religion or faith in their religions, especially Christian Catholicism. It’s tough to change their mind, no matter what. Even though some don’t often go to church, they always present themselves as catholic. Even though they are supposed to go to church every weekend. But they don’t go that often, maybe they would attend it once or twice a year.

Also, some Buddhists behave; likewise, they don’t even go to the temple for years, but they always present themselves as Buddhists when asked. It’s just because their parents are Buddhists, and they are told they are also Buddhists like their parents. So, what kind of faith are they truly practicing here? It’s difficult to say. It’s kind of like a tradition, a tradition that your children may follow. Faith comes from the heart and true belief.

Afterward, faith in a religion, I would say, is significant because if you don’t have faith in a religion, then you don’t have any religion, and you are not a member of any of them. For instance, if you don’t have faith in Christianity, you would never present yourself as a Christian. However, it isn’t always the case, as I often go to churches when not mass time to meditate.

I encourage people if they are spiritual practitioners and practice meditation. When you would try to go to church when you meditate in church, you will progress faster. You can go into deeper meditation than you go to temples to meditate. Because the sounding churches, when there are no people, it’s extremely quiet and full of intense spiritual energy connection, while temples are often filled with people who love to talk and chit chat, sometimes with too many statues that can distract your concentration. That fact is very interesting.