ABSTRACT
Many have long relied on “belief system” as a handy synonym for what others might just simply call a religion or a world religion. This common word “belief” is much more complex than it might at first appear, entailing assumptions about religion and even what it means to be human, and so for this reason it deserves closer scrutiny. The term “belief” has a lengthy history in English, something that now includes popular usage. The notion of belief is coupled with having the correct under standing of a particular Christian ritual. This distinction became from the earliest period a convenient way to differentiate Christian belief from Jewish ritual, and, later, was relied upon to minimize what Protestants portrayed as Roman Catholicism’s excessive focus on what was character ized as disingenuous and thus empty and insincere outward performance.
