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Reader question: Please explain this sentence, particularly “blind faith”: Like so many other students, Mikhail took out her loans on a kind of “blind faith” that she could deal with the consequences. My comments: She borrowed money (took out her loans) in order to complete school. Now she’s finding it difficult to pay back those loans. At any rate, that’s the feeling I get from the tone of the sentence, especially “blind faith”. I hope she’ll eventually be debt free but for now, let’s, well, dwell on “blind faith” a little bit. Faith, you see, is a strong, fervent belief. To have faith is a much stronger feeling than to have belief in something. Belief is a reasonable trust in something being true. We, for example, may choose to believe or not believe whether someone tells the truth in court based on what they say and the manner in which they say it. Faith, on the other hand, is a belief so strong that it goes beyond reason, or the rational process. Hence the term blind faith – blind as in blind love. Religious faith is sometimes called blind faith because religion often asks for total obedience without questioning. I once had a heated intellectual discussion with a devout Christian with his new-found religion but in a matter of seconds we were able to reach the conclusion that we had to agree not to agree because neither one of us was going to convince the other. | 
