Faith isn't easy

[Dob]

Faith is hard for a rational mind. I know some think that a rational mind and Faith are mutually exclusive terms, but I disagree, and that disagreement is harder then any self professed atheist can understand.

My rational side tells me that the very idea of an all loving, all powerful God just doesn’t make sense. That He created us and for some reason cares about what we do is kinda of absurd. How could any “being” with enough power to create an entire universe and everything in it… care about us silly humans running around on a small planet in a nondescript solar system around a medium star.

I see the horrible things people do to each other every day, and I just dont understand any of it. I hear the normal response from those of faith, “God has a plan”. I just cannot see any plan that would allow cancer to kill a baby, or allow a madman to rape and kill little girls. If that is a plan, what kind of person would design it? Would you want to follow that person? Pray to Him?

War, famine, disease, all these things could be fixed with a wave of His little finger, and yet He holds back… Why? Life doesn’t have to be so hard. If life is meant to “teach” us something, couldn’t we just read the lesson? We have a soul, must it be tortured so? And what does life teach a little baby born with some horrible disease, and doesn’t reach it’s first birthday? Life sucks?

I know all these things, I do. And yet, I just cannot dismiss this belief I have in God. It’s not like I grew up in a very religious home. I actually grew up in several foster homes as a child. I never had any formal introduction to God. And yet, I believe.

Is it fear that keeps me believing? Fear that everything is meaningless, and it’s all empty darkness in the end? To be truthful to myself, maybe a little. I certainly wouldn’t like to think that all we have done or will ever do means nothing. But while that is a piece, it’s not everything. I would rather know a truth, than follow a lie. No matter how comforting that lie may be to me.

Sometimes I wish I was just some fundi who has been so brainwashed by relgion that they cannot see past their own noses. That kind of blind faith would almost be comforting. But I’m not , I’m just not built that way.

I have had two things happen to me in my life that I have always contributed to God. As I have gotten older, I begin to see even those things differently… and I wonder. And yet, I still believe.

So every day I get up, go about my life in the usual ways. And every night before I sleep, I say a prayer. And some nights I wonder if I’m just talking to myself. Yet still tonight I will lay down, close my eyes, and say a prayer.

If you don’t agree with my beliefs, I can respect that. If you think religion is the worst thing that ever happened to the human race, I can see your point. If you compare God to Invisble Pink Unicorns, I see why. Just do me a favor and dont ever think that my belief comes from ignorance or is easy, because it’s neither.

[SkipMagic]

Witnessing threads go in GD, so I’ll move this there for you.

[brewha]

I fully agree. Faith isn’t easy.

My biggest problem right now is that if there is a god, he’s a real prick. Too many really terrible things happened to those who were very close to me in a very short time span. I’m sure some religious zelot could explain them in some way that gives them comfort, but I’m not buying that there is a loving god.

I’d love to believe that there is something after death. I’m hoping that I can have my faith restored in some way before I die. But right now, I just can’t believe in religion.

[Bryan_Ekers]

Hey, whatever coping mechanism you need to get through the day is fine by me, up to the point you start imposing it on others, be it a religious person seeking to have laws conform to his beliefs or an alcoholic who drives drunk.

[Der_Trihs]

@Dob

Faith is hard for a rational mind. I know some think that a rational mind and Faith are mutually exclusive terms, but I disagree, and that disagreement is harder then any self professed atheist can understand.

Not at all. You just don’t want to admit that it’s true, so you don’t; easy enough to understand. To the extent that any mind has faith, it is not rational; they are mutally exclusive.

Faith is not hard; it’s easy. You just don’t want to give up your security blanket. Facing the real world is much harder than faith. Facing that there’s no God to save you, no afterlife to hope for, that there’s no hidden greater purpose behind the suffering of the world, that praying won’t do you a bit of good; that’s harder than wrapping yourself in the delusion that God-Daddy will protect you, that everything is for the good despite appearances and that there’s something after death.

[glee]

One point that concerns me is which God you have such faith in.

Do you believe in Jesus? Then what is your attitude to Judaism?

Are you Protestant? Then what is your attitude to the Pope?

And so on…

[Voyager]

I think that you’ve demonstrated that faith is easy, in that you’ve given into it. But I don’t think you praying is any different from the fact that I like to eat tongue (cow tongue ) and don’t like ham. That was the way I grew up.

The real question is whether you would do something that would adversely affect other people based on this faith you don’t really believe in. If not, I don’t think your beliefs are any more significant than a like for redheads over blondes.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Der Trihs

Faith is not hard; it’s easy. You just don’t want to give up your security blanket. Facing the real world is much harder than faith. Facing that there’s no God to save you, no afterlife to hope for, that there’s no hidden greater purpose behind the suffering of the world, that praying won’t do you a bit of good; that’s harder than wrapping yourself in the delusion that God-Daddy will protect you, that everything is for the good despite appearances and that there’s something after death.

Yeah, c’mon, join us, Dob. And the board will live as one.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@Dob

Faith is hard for a rational mind. I know some think that a rational mind and Faith are mutually exclusive terms, but I disagree, and that disagreement is harder then any self professed atheist can understand.

Thank you. Any remark I might make about rejecting a generalised view of people of faith only to accept a negative generalisation of atheists would be, I assure you, directed solely at you and not at others.

[kanicbird]

@Dob

see the horrible things people do to each other every day, and I just dont understand any of it. I hear the normal response from those of faith, “God has a plan”. I just cannot see any plan that would allow cancer to kill a baby, or allow a madman to rape and kill little girls.

The way I see it the plan that creates death & oppression is a misuse of God’s power by Satan. God’s plan is to rescue humanity from that fate. Just as God won’t force you to be loving, God won’t force that on Satan either, so Satan’s plan will continue to run till Jesus returns, which also effects us.

Is it fear that keeps me believing? Fear that everything is meaningless, and it’s all empty darkness in the end?

Fear is not of God, but of the flesh and/or Satan (depending on the circumstances). I suspect that fear has you believing just enough that you don’t go further and discover the real God. You commented others being brainwashed by religion, which indicates that you may think that’s the way to find God, it is not.

[Lobohan]

You know the stuff that’s telling you that you can’t rationally believe in god? It’s your brain, listen to it.

Religion is training wheels for your life, you’re a big kid, get rid of them.

[Dob]

Faith is not hard; it’s easy. You just don’t want to give up your security blanket. Facing the real world is much harder than faith…

That is kinda the point I was making. Knowing the world for what it is, and yet still having Faith is much harder than you give it credit for.

Any remark I might make about rejecting a generalised view of people of faith only to accept a negative generalisation of atheists would be, I assure you, directed solely at you and not at others.

Point taken. My brush perhaps was a bit broad, but I was going for a picture from ten thousand feet, not two, and that takes a big brush. No offense intended.

I suspect that fear has you believing just enough that you don’t go further and discover the real God.

Interesting. Let me think on that a bit and reply later on this one.

[BrainGlutton]

@Dob

I have had two things happen to me in my life that I have always contributed to God.

Nitpick: You mean, “attributed.”

For the rest: From A History of Western Philosophy (1945), by Bertrand Russell, Chapter XIX, “Rousseau”:

In theology he [Rousseau] made an innovation which has now been accepted by the great majority of Protestant theologians. Before him, every philosopher from Plato onward, if he believed in God, offered intellectual arguments in favor of his belief. The arguments may not, to us, seem very convincing, and we may feel that they would not have seemed cogent to anyone who did not already feel sure of the truth of the conclusion. But the philosopher who advanced the arguments certainly believed them to be logically valid, and such as should cause certainty of God’s existence in any unprejudiced person of sufficient philosophical capacity. Modern Protestants who urge us to believe in God, for the most part, despise the old “proofs,” and base their faith upon some aspect of human nature – emotions of awe or mystery, the sense of right and wrong, the feeling of aspiration, and so on. This way of defending religious belief was invented by Rousseau. It has become so familiar to us that its originality may easily not be appreciated by a modern reader, unless he will take the trouble to compare Rousseau with (say) Descartes or Leibniz.

“Ah, Madame!” Rousseau writes to an aristocratic lady, “sometimes in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight over my eyes or in the darkness of the night, I am of the opinion that there is no God. But look yonder: the rising of the sun, as it scatters the mists that cover the earth, and lays bare the wondrous glittering scene of nature, disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul. I find my faith again, and my God, and my belief in Him. I admire and adore Him, and prostrate myself in His presence.”

On another occasion he says, “I believe in God as strongly as I believe any other truth, because believing and not believing are the last things in the world that depend on me.” This form of argument has the drawback of being private; the fact that Rousseau cannot help believing something affords no ground for another person to believe the same thing.

<snip>

The rejection of reason in favor of the heart was not, to my mind, an advance. In fact, no one thought of this device so long as reason appeared to be on the side of religious belief. In Rousseau’s environment, reason, as represented by Voltaire, was opposed to religion, therefore away with reason! Moreover, reason was abstruse and difficult; the savage, even when he has dined, cannot understand the ontological argument, and yet the savage is the repository of all necessary wisdom. Rousseau’s savage – who was not the savage known to antrhopologists – was a good husband and a kind father; he was destitute of greed, and had a religion of natural kindliness. He was a convenient person, but if he could follow the good Vicar’s reasons for believing in God he must have had more philosophy than his innocent naivete would lead one to expect.

Apart from the fictitious character of Rousseau’s “natural man,” there are two objections to the practice of basing beliefs as to objective fact upon the emotions of the heart. One is that there is no reason whatever to suppose that such beliefs will be true; the other is, that the resulting beliefs will be private, since the heart says different things to different people. Some savages are persuaded by the “natural light” that it is their duty to eat people, and even Voltaire’s savages, who are led by the voice of reason to hold that one should only eat Jesuits, are not wholly satisfactory. To Buddhists, the light of nature does not reveal the existence of God, but does proclaim that it is wrong to eat the flesh of animals. But even if the heart said the same thing to all men, that could afford no evidence for the existence of anything outside our own emotions. However ardently I, or all mankind, may desire something, however necessary it may be to human happiness, there is no ground for supposing this something to exist. There is no law of nature guaranteeing that mankind should be happy. Everybody can see that this is true of our life here on earth, but by a curious twist our sufferings in this life are made into an argument for a better life hereafter. We should not employ such an argument in any other connection. If you had bought ten dozen eggs from a man, and the first dozen were all rotten, you would not infer that the remaining nine dozen must be of surpassing excellence; yet that is the kind of reasoning that “the heart” encourages as a consolation for our sufferings here below.

For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau. The old arguments at least were honest: if valid, they proved their point; if invalid, it was open to any critic to prove them so. But the new theology of the heart dispenses with argument; it cannot be refuted, because it does not profess to prove its points. At bottom, the only reason offered for its acceptance is that it allows us to indulge in pleasant dreams. This is an unworthy reason, and if I had to choose between Thomas Aquinas and Rousseau, I should unhestitatingly choose the saint.

[begbert2]

@Dob

That is kinda the point I was making. Knowing the world for what it is, and yet still having Faith is much harder than you give it credit for.

I have the opposite problem; I don’t find enough evidence of a lack of God to dismiss the possibility entirely, but there is certainly enough evidence to logically eliminate (via contradiction) most or all of the good scenarios that are presented that involve a god. So, nightmarish fear and horror plucks around the edges of my rational mind, whispering dire things that might inevitably await, if there is any basis whatsoever to theistic claims.

Being unable to fully dismiss the irrational belief that everything will turn out okay sounds pretty easy, really.

[Dunawake]

Good post, Dob, and know that you aren’t alone. I’ve been struggling with the same issues as you and I’m still not sure how to resolve them. Despite the local atheist crowd crowing about how simple it all is.

[Alan_Smithee]

That is an excellent quote, Brain Glutton. I wish I’d read it years ago.

[Triskadecamus]

If your faith requires you to do things you like to do, and act ways that you like to act, well, no, it’s not all that hard. If your faith requires you to do things you find difficult, and costly to yourself, and to act according to strict standards of conduct at levels you find difficult to achieve, then, yes, it can be quite hard. If your faith requires you to tell other people how to think, feel, and act, then that’s probably fairly easy on you, but harder on other people. The other people might choose to be hard on you, but that’s not faith, that’s theology.

Tris

[wonky]

@Dob

Faith is hard for a rational mind. I know some think that a rational mind and Faith are mutually exclusive terms, but I disagree, and that disagreement is harder then any self professed atheist can understand.

No, because I was in the same position five or six years ago. It was a struggle to have faith. I wasn’t one of those people (I would have said blessed then, I would say closer to cursed now) for whom faith was as easy as breathing. I had to reject the whole idea of Jesus as anything but a fable to gain the tiniest bit of stability in the ole brainpan. I simply knew there was a God, absolutely knew it, while still being unable to examine the belief. I couldn’t think about it. Thinking about it was uncomfortable and embarrassing.

And then the problem of evil, the same thing you’re dealing with, finally smothered the faith right out of me.

From that experience I’m guessing it was such a struggle for me because it wasn’t who I really was. To use an analogy: I came out of the atheist closet, I guess. I was trying to fake a normal, straight relationship with God when I was really heterodox (language is fun). Once I accepted who I am, those problems went away.

And now I look at what I was doing to myself, the contortions I had to do, and I’m so puzzled. But I was right. I knew I was right.

People is weird.

[DanBlather]

The earth-centric model was difficult too. You had to make all sorts of weird calculations and assume that planets did loopdy-loops to make it work. Realizing that all the planets revolved around the sun made it much easier.

If you find faith hard maybe your mind is sending you a signal. I stopped believing in God in my early teens, and after a couple of difficult years I have never looked back.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@Dob

Point taken. My brush perhaps was a bit broad, but I was going for a picture from ten thousand feet, not two, and that takes a big brush. No offense intended.

No problem. Sorry to have been snarky.