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The given belief is faith, because it is based in what someone has read, heard, or been told by someone.

I would have to disagree with you right there, spunkets. And thus with your following conclusion.

I do not have "faith" because of something I've read, or because someone told me what to "believe" — and I, credulous fool that I am, simply believed it, without doing any work on my part. Duh!!!

My faith was acquired "the hard way" — by experience, by meditating on the world and its contents, including man and especially including me, and how it all fits together. In suffering and joyfulness. In good times and bad, over the course of some seven decades (I'll be 62 in May). Gradually, increasingly with the passage of time, by opening my soul to the illumination of the Holy Spirit; by trusting in Jesus Christ.

Along the way, I have found the Holy Scriptures to have been an inerrant guide to making sense of the world in which I live. I have discovered no finding in natural science that has ever contradicted anything in the Bible. These two "revelations" — the Book of Holy Scripture and the Book of Nature — correspond and work together astonishingly well.

And finally, I have faith because the Presence of God has been directly revealed to me on several occasions in my life, mainly at critical times when I've sensed myself to be in real imminent danger — in most cases physical danger, but on one occasion spiritual. (The latter was actually the most frightening.) I believe in angels, for I have actually met a couple of them.... I could go on, but at a certain point, such matters become very personal.

God got me through these ordeals (in most cases, without me even asking for His help). So of course I trust Him! He has already "saved me from myself" so many times by now, that I have no doubt that He'll continue to be my Savior. And Judge. Now and forever.

If God did not exist, neither would the world. For His Logos is the beginning, end, and guide to everything in-between in the natural world — which points to the world to come.

FWIW.

In short, Christians have reasons for being Christians: We're not just dumb, passive ventriloquist dummies!

"I do not have "faith" because of something I've read, or because someone told me what to "believe"...simply believed it, without doing any work on my part."

The amount of work, or examination one does is irrelevant. Faith is fundamentally based on what someone has heard, read, or has been told. Nothing that you've posted contradicts that. What might be considered your strongest evidence can amount to no more than testimony. IOWs, it is fundamentally no more than a claim.

"If God did not exist, neither would the world."

That's a claim based on what you have heard and read. Where's your evidence for such a claim, that anyone can examine at will by the scientific method?