"Faith is not faith without believing"

A quick update:
I apologize (again) for not updating recently. I've been swamped with school, work, and just trying to answer emails and messages from individuals in the US keeping in touch with me. We're hitting the final stretch and my professors are definitely making all of us feel it. I've had at least one major (at least 750 words) essay a week for the past two weeks and this next week I have two that are due. Along with all the essay writing, we're assigned readings and in the past week and a half I've read about 300 pages of texts ranging from the philosophies during Protestant Reformation to a modern art critic talking about "Sexual Personae" in the Renaissance. And to top off the "exciting" workload, it has been raining for at least the past two weeks every day (we had two days where the sun shone for a few hours but it ended up raining again).

To overcome this "dreariness" I've been listening to 104.7 The Fish a lot more every day and really getting into a couple of books that I'm reading: "Captivating" by: John and Stasi Eldridge, "Blue Like Jazz" by: Donald Miller, and "Radical" by: David Plath. They're all "religious" books, but they each touch on VERY different subjects. I really like reading all three of them simultaneously though. It's provided me with an interesting "balance" in a way, as I read each of these author's points of view.

I've also been reading these more heavily because I've been doing a lot of readings for my political science class and I've wanted to make sure that I don't become drawn into ideas that aren't Christian and could pull me off of God's path of truth. Ironically though, as I've been compiling excerpts from the texts I've read for polisci, I've found some pretty eloquently stated beliefs that I've found consistent with things that I've read in the Bible and not contradictory to my beliefs but actually enforcing them and enlightening them in a way. So I want to share some of the quotes that I've gathered thus far and leave you with these for today:

“Prophecy is not an art, nor, when it is taken for prediction, a constant vocation, but an extraordinary and temporary employment from God, most often of good men, but sometimes also of the wicked.”
– Leviathan by: Thomas Hobbes

“All the life and power of true religion consist in the inward and full persuasion of the mind; and faith is not faith without believing.”
–A Letter Concerning Toleration by: John Locke

“Can it, may some say, be properly said that God hath voice and language, when it cannot be properly said He hath a tongue or other organs as a man? …For to see and hear are honourable attributes, and may be given to God to declare as far as capacity can conceive His almighty power. But if it were to be taken in the strict and proper sense, one might argue from his making of all other parts of man's body that he had also the same use of them which we have; which would be many of them so uncomely as it would be the greatest contumely in the world to ascribe them to Him.”
–Leviathan by: Thomas Hobbes

“So that the controversy between these churches about the truth of their doctrines and the purity of their worship is on both sides equal; nor is there any judge, either at Constantinople or elsewhere upon earth, by whose sentence it can be determined. The decision of that question belongs only to the Supreme judge of all men, to whom also alone belongs the punishment of the erroneous.”
–A Letter Concerning Toleration by: John Locke

“I cannot be saved by a religion that I distrust and by a worship that I abhor. It is in vain for an unbeliever to take up the outward show of another man’s profession. Faith only and inward sincerity are the things that procure acceptance with God.”
–A Letter Concerning Toleration by: John Locke