Faith is a Piece of Wood. Belief Is A String.

What is belief? Belief is placing your trust in something. Belief is giving your confidence to something. Belief is being convinced of the truth of something. Faith and belief are obviously related. The problem is how to go about illustrating them clearly so people can understand.

The following may help. Think of faith as a piece of wood. It has shape and form, length and width. It has weight. It is a natural organic material. When dropped, it falls. When placed on a table, it stays there until we pick it up again. It is going to stay in its current shape. Unless we do something to it like: cut, shave, or sand it.

We could burn it. We would get water vapor, carbon, carbon dioxide, and some left over minerals that we collectively call ashes. By burning it, we have irrevocably changed the wood's appearance, shape and form.

However, given time, we could grow a new tree to get new wood again using the materials from the burned wood.

We want to use the wood, as wood. We might want to change its shape for certain circumstances. We'll start with a piece of shaped wood called a rod, or a stick. We have a task for this rod. We are going to wrap, or coil a string that is 150 feet long around the rod. We will do this because we want to be able to take the string off the rod neatly. We want to do this while laying it out, or stretching it, in a straight line. We do not want to get any knots in the string.

A wooden rod used for this kind of purpose is called a spindle. Using a spindle like this, usually works pretty well. It does take a lot of care while taking the string from the spindle. There are many different kinds of things can happen. This is true due to the way the string happens to be coiled around the spindle. It may also be because the spindle is not handled exactly correctly. Severe knotting can result from mishandling. This severe knotting is called a snarl.

It is called a snarl because that is what you do when you make one. A snarl is the sound you make in disgust with yourself when you inadvertently make one. Once snarled, the string can be very difficult to straighten out properly.

We can avoid having many of the spindle mishaps. The mishaps that cause snarls. If we go ahead and change the shape of the wood before we wrap the string around it. We can reshape a rod of wood into a spool. A spool is a wooden tube that can spin on an axle. The outside of the tube has shoulders at each end. This makes a spool.

Now, when we wrap the string around the piece of wood, the string stays between the shoulders. When we want to remove the string, we put an axle through the tube. The spool can now spin controllably on the axle. The string can come off neatly with many fewer problems.

Faith is a piece of wood. Belief is string.

Shaped faith, formed faith, controls belief. Shaped faith allows belief to be used properly without snarls.

String can be used to make a net, or a thick rope.

Nets can catch, or be used to carry. Ropes can bind, or be used to pull.

Belief can do all these things.

(c) Copyright 2006: George Wallace recently published a book on religion which lashes out at nearly all of the comfortable ideas about God, the trappings of organized religion, and the priesthood. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will interest everyone. This article may be freely reprinted so long as all copyright attributions, and the full content of this resource box are included. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com

Article Source: http://www.writerspenarticledirectory.com

Please Rate this Article

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 

Not yet Rated