Osho – Faith is a love affair and belief is only an intellectual conviction

Osho – Two things have to be remembered. One is that faith does not mean belief. Belief is of the mind and faith is of the heart. Faith is a love affair and belief is only an intellectual conviction. Belief can be easily destroyed by arguments; faith can never be destroyed. No argument can destroy faith because it is not based on arguments in the first place. But belief is based in arguments.
Belief is philosophical; faith is religious. Belief is a false coin. It looks like faith but it is fake. Somebody believes in god — that is not faith. Jesus has faith in god, not belief. The pope believes in god — it is not faith. He has not experienced it himself. That is the first thing to be noted. I am all in favor of faith but absolutely against all belief systems.
The second thing is that faith is never static. Belief is always static. Faith is like a river: moving, dynamic, alive, increasing — like a tree growing, new foliage coming, new buds opening, new flowers. It is always a movement from one peak to another peak, from one perfection to another perfection, from one joy to another joy, from one mystery to another
mystery. It is a non-ending pilgrimage.
Belief is dead, it is like a corpse. It never moves. It is like a pond, stagnant, it stinks. And the world is full of believers; that’s why there is so much misery, so much ignorance, so much superstition. The whole earth is stinking for the simple reason that people have lost all contact with real religiousness.
Religiousness is always movement. Buddha used to say that the religious person lives in verbs, not in nouns. In fact nouns don’t exist in reality, only verbs. Nouns exist only in dictionaries and human languages. They are our inventions. For example a tree: it is a noun, it is only part of our language. If you look at a real tree, it is not a tree, it is a treeing, because it is constantly moving. When you are looking at it a few old leaves are falling, new leaves are coming out. It is treeing, it is not a tree.
We say river — that is a noun — but no river is a river, all rivers are rivering, moving, going towards the ocean. Faith is always increasing, and the person who lives in faith grows, grows to ultimate heights. And the person who lives in beliefs is a dead person. He trusts in something which is dead, and the ultimate result is that he becomes dead himself. Avoid beliefs and risk everything for faith.
Source – Osho Book “Fingers Pointing to the Moon”