In religion, faith is "belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion".
Religious people often think of faith as confidence based on a perceived degree of warrant, or evidence, while others who are more skeptical of religion tend to think of faith as belief without evidence.
Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, ethics, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. It is an essentially contested concept. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings.
The origin of religious belief is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, a sense of community, and dreams. Religions have sacred histories, narratives, and mythologies, preserved in oral traditions, sacred texts, symbols, and holy places, that may attempt to explain the origin of life, the universe, and other phenomena. Religious practice may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, matrimonial and funerary services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, or public service.
Religious assimilation refers to the adoption of a majority or dominant culture's religious practices and beliefs by a minority or subordinate culture. It is an important form of cultural assimilation.
Religious assimilation includes the religious conversion of individuals from a minority faith to the dominant faith. It can also include the religious indoctrination of children into a dominant religion by their converted parents. However, religious assimilation need not involve wholesale adoption of a dominant religious belief system by a minority; the concept is broad enough to include alterations in the frequency of religious participation to match that of the dominant culture. Indeed, religious assimilation among immigrant groups most commonly involves such minor changes, rather than sweeping change in religious belief systems.
Quality of life (QOL) is defined by the World Health Organization as "an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns".
Standard indicators of the quality of life include wealth, employment, the environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, social belonging, religious beliefs, safety, security and freedom. QOL has a wide range of contexts, including the fields of international development, healthcare, politics and employment. Health related QOL (HRQOL) is an evaluation of QOL and its relationship with health.
Christian ministry is the vocational work of living and teaching about faith, in the hopes of increasing the population of God's people done by the church, church officials, congregational members, and Jesus followers. The Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature defines Christian ministry as "to denote a devotion to the interests of God's cause, and, in a technical sense, the work of advancing the Redeemer's kingdom". All ministry may fall under the call of, the Great Commission, that Jesus presented to his disciples to continue the spread of the Gospel.
While the spread of the Gospel is every believer's purpose, the primary and only vocation of the bible is to live a life aligned with God, as his children, towards the purpose of displaying the love of Jesus through one's actions and decisions. Some see vocation as one's true calling professionally, yet others see it as a furthering of God's kingdom not the occupation, like Maitland states "the work itself is not the vocation". Vocation calls Christian ministry to reach all aspects of ones life, a way of life many believe. In short, Christian ministry, as a whole, is any vocational work done for the sake of the Great Commission.
In monotheistic religious belief systems, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. In polytheistic belief, a god is "a spirit or being believed to have created, or for controlling some part of the universe or life, for which such a deity is often worshipped". Belief in the existence of at least one deity, who may interact with the world, is called theism.
Conceptions of God vary considerably. Many notable theologians and philosophers have developed arguments for and against the existence of God. Atheism rejects the belief in any deity. Agnosticism is the belief that the existence of God is unknown or unknowable. Some theists view knowledge concerning God as derived from faith. God is often conceived as the greatest entity in existence. God is often believed to be the cause of all things and so is seen as the creator, sustainer, and ruler of the universe. God is often thought of as incorporeal and independent of the material creation, which was initially called pantheism, although church theologians, in attacking pantheism, described pantheism as the belief that God is the material universe itself. God is sometimes seen as omnibenevolent, while deism holds that God is not involved with humanity apart from creation.
Heaven, or the Heavens, is a common religious cosmological or supernatural place where beings such as deities, angels, souls, saints, or venerated ancestors are said to originate, be enthroned, or reside. According to the beliefs of some religions, heavenly beings can descend to Earth or incarnate and earthly beings can ascend to Heaven in the afterlife or, in exceptional cases, enter Heaven without dying.
Heaven is often described as a "highest place", the holiest place, a paradise, in contrast to Hell or the Underworld or the "low places" and universally or conditionally accessible by earthly beings according to various standards of divinity, goodness, piety, faith, or other virtues or right beliefs or simply divine will. Some believe in the possibility of a heaven on Earth in a world to come.
Creationism is the religious belief that nature, and aspects such as the universe, Earth, life, and humans, originated with supernatural acts of divine creation, and is often pseudoscientific. In its broadest sense, creationism includes various religious views, which differ in their acceptance or rejection of modern scientific concepts, such as evolution, that describe the origin and development of natural phenomena.
The term creationism most often refers to belief in special creation: the claim that the universe and lifeforms were created as they exist today by divine action, and that the only true explanations are those which are compatible with a Christian fundamentalist literal interpretation of the creation myth found in the Bible's Genesis creation narrative. Since the 1970s, the most common form of this has been Young Earth creationism which posits special creation of the universe and lifeforms within the last 10,000 years on the basis of flood geology, and promotes pseudoscientific creation science. From the 18th century onward, Old Earth creationism accepted geological time harmonized with Genesis through gap or day-age theory, while supporting anti-evolution. Modern old-Earth creationists support progressive creationism and continue to reject evolutionary explanations. Following political controversy, creation science was reformulated as intelligent design and neo-creationism.