No, knowledge does not equal belief, but I didn't say that it did. In addition, while I made no claim that faith equals belief, I did imply that faith and belief walk hand in hand, an accurate statement, I think. What I was trying to say--unsuccessfully, it seems--about confidence and knowledge was not that they are the same, but that confidence in our beliefs can elevate--internally--those beliefs to something that we call "knowledge." In that way, we can see that while the one can affect the other, they are not synonymous in any way. Finally, while I agree with all six equations, I don't think that all of them are applicable to what I wrote.

At some level, everything filters through the individual: His or her perceptions are the sole input, and those perceptions are colored by experience. When you say that one's humanity is verifiable and that one's love of pizza is not, you are--it seems--relying on outside perceptions to determine the existence of both proof and fallacy. That is, theoretically, someone outside of myself can verify that I am human, while that same someone cannot verify that I love pizza. I would argue that either statement can be true or false depending on where you draw the line. If I did not believe in my own existence, I would have to look to others to prove that I am real, which places the verifiable truth of me in external hands. What if I didn't believe them? Anyway proof of one's own existence cannot come from outside oneself: For me to believe that you exist, I have to believe that I do; if I don't believe that I exist, there is no framework for your existence, and if I don't believe that you exist, you can't "prove" to me that I do. In that way, I it is possible for me to disbelieve in my own reality both because I have a self-disorder, for example, and because I don't trust in anything outside of myself, which I is something that I also don't trust, which . . . Contradictions all around. That my existence is "proven" in the eyes of others doesn't, given that context, make it definitively true--to me. Now if you are talking about reasonably true, that's another story.

Can I prove that I love pizza? That's a toughie. Where is the line drawn? If I go out to dinner with my friends every Friday (assuming that I, they, and _Friday_s exist), and we go to a restaurant that has a large and diverse menu, and I always (let's say 156 weeks in a row) order pizza, is that not proof that I love pizza (onion and tomato--yum!)? In the absence of proof that I am intentionally deceiving my friends into believing something that is not true, is it not reasonable to draw the line so that an external individual's empirical evidence of my love of pizza falls within the admittedly grey region of "proven fact"? And yet, proof is and can only be personal and must be recognized--to some degree--as such. Perhaps this is where "confidence" comes in: It might be argued--given the premise that we all, to some degree, form our own realities--that what each individual self is confident is real, is. The problem with that is that the nature of self is still in dispute. Neuroscientists tell us that they are able to pinpoint the areas of the brain in which aesthetics, love, and religious experience make their homes. With all that, the part of the brain in charge of sense of self remains elusive. Does that mean that there is no such thing as a "self"? In the end, nothing can be proven about anything, objectively, because at some point, those involved in the exercise have to concede that Yeah, alright, this is real and Sure, and I guess that's real, too. Maybe nothing can be proven because nothing exists--the old notion of "our lives are merely the dreams of a creator." But let me tell ya, my creator loves pizza.

I am new to the logic game. Well, not in my head, but in the real (whatever that means) world. So I might not be using the correct terms, but the logic itself is, I think, sound.