I’ve always really liked this quote from comics author Alan Moore:

“Faith is for sissies who daren’t go look for themselves.”

But I also rather like this distinction made in the glossary of that Metahistory site in their entry on “Faith”:

The confidence that what one knows, feels, or senses is ultimately real and can be verified by direct personal experience. Distinguished from belief, which always involves suppositions that cannot be verified, faith may be regarded as intuitive certainty, rather than blind reliance on suppositions. For instance, to have faith in life after death is not the same as embracing beliefs about life after death. Faith, defined as confidence in what it is possible to experience or achieve for oneself, can exist independent of beliefs.

They of course go on to point out that’s a pretty far cry from the typical definition of what faith is, since those definitions usually center around the inability or limitedness of the human being to know or experience certain things. This later paragraph about people who “follow their faith” is also good, especially the part about cable tv.

If what I believe has not been chosen by me but for me, the faith I hold in my beliefs will seem even more transcendent to my personal reality. Such faith aligns me to powers greater than myself — yes, but what exactly are these powers? Those who live by this extremist code assume that the faith derived from beliefs not of their own choosing aligns them to a superhuman agency, God. But where do these items of received belief come from? Where do the “laws of God” originate? In every instance, they are supplied by religious institutions. But faith in the beliefs provided by an institution such as Islam or the Catholic Church aligns its adherents, not to Allah or God, but to the donor institution. What is taken for a connection to Divinity is really an obligation to take the word of God’s self-appointed representatives “on faith.” . In great measure, the blindness of conventional faith resides in how it allows the believer to ignore where his or her faith is actually based. It is as if I relied on a cable tv service to supply me with programs to watch, but assumed that the programs come from superior beings on Mars. Delusion of this type of passes for normal in the realm of world religions.

[Also check out the stuff I posted from them about the nature of belief.]