If you believe someone is looking after you, and bad things happen, all you can do is wonder what you did wrong. Without faith you can examine your actions, and either find things you can improve, or conclude that it was just bad luck. Without faith no one would have to write a book about why bad things happen to good people - they just do, and it doesn’t mean the people they happen to are any less good.
And when good things happen to you, you can be proud of your accomplishments (or be happy about your good luck) without worrying that it was someone else who did it for you.
Things make a lot more sense without faith. Enjoy them.
It depends: faith in what? in God? the universe? good luck? humanity? specific people? faith that everything will work out okay or that everything as a purpose?
Some of these I have lost, some I have not, some I maybe never had.
I don’t have faith in the universe, or in good luck, or that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people in the proportion that they deserve, certainly not in this life and maybe not at all. I don’t know if I ever had faith in such things, though probably as a relatively sheltered kid I had a sense that the world was safer and fairer and more sensible than it actually is.
I still believe in God, and that God loves us and cares about us, but God doesn’t necessarily care about the same things we care about or look at things the way we do. You could say I’ve lost faith in a predictable or easily understandable God; I’ve given up trying to predict what God can be expected to do. God certainly isn’t going to make things easy for me. I believe prayer can and does make a difference, but that there are no guarantees.
I’ve lost whatever faith I had that things will work out fine for me no matter what I do: that’s shirking responsibilty for my own life. Nor do I have faith that things will work out for me provided I do _____ and don’t do _____: there’s plenty that’s outside my control, including but not limited to what other people choose to do to me.
I’ve struggled with my faith. I’ve lost some illusions. I’ve had to throw out some beliefs and refine others. But to get rid of faith altogether—that’d be too easy in one sense and too hard in another. I know too many people, both in person and by reading, etc., who have had it way harder than I have and who have come through with strong, mature, nuanced faith, to give up on mine. Instead, I choose to continue the struggle of trying to figure out what, and whom, I can trust and what I can’t.
Not that long ago in human terms, a very long time ago for me, and an infintesimally small amount of time ago for the universe, I found I didn’t really believe in God.
Naturally, this discovery was unpleasant. Yet I found it rooted in ignorance and self-absorption. I searched out the facts and truth enough for me. I lived my life, and I eventually found that I hadn’t outgrown religion. I just outgrew an old shell and needed a new one.
Plus, later on I tried talking to God. That was normal. I was somewhat amazed when God talked back. He didn’t say much. He didn’t need to.
Hardly a day goes by when I don’t ask myself “Have I lost my faith now?” And then I realize, If I’m still worried about it’s presence, it hasn’t left me completely. That being said, I’m hardly what you might call a Christian, because the whole notion of the Trinity just flummoxes me. More of theist or deist, I guess: my faith is simply that there is a creator, but I consider him more like a benevolent manager of a very complex ant farm. Does he ever tap the glass? That’s the million-dollar question …
Because things happen that are not “cause and effect”. Cancer is one. There are a lot of other crappy circumstances that I don’t believe someone can cause. I’d hate to become one of those santimonious people who piss all over any thread in which people bitch about their lives by insisting it’s all their fault. The people who say being poor is a choice.
(Not that I’m saying you’re one of those people, but you’ve got to know what I mean)
Fate was always about explaining the things I have no control over. Chaos is the only other option. I think believing every single thing that happens to you is your own doing is simply arrogance of the lucky and well born. An important part of faith (for me) is coping with bad things that happen. I think if I really believed that any suffering I went through was my own fault, the weight of that would cause me to jump off a bridge.
I never had any faith, I was brought up a heathen and never believed in God. I don’t feel any sense of loss, although at times I have thought wistfully that it would be nice to blame everything on an invisible deity instead of just, you know, life. I just can’t bring myself to do so, I can’t make myself believe. I get the concept, that you’re supposed to believe unconditionally and not require proof and that’s why they call it “faith.” I just can’t do it, and I don’t think I could no matter how badly I wanted to. I suspect there is a great sense of relief in having faith - in fact I think this is reason people have it.
This is me, except I took a little longer to give it up completely. I guess I wanted to believe that there was an invisible, all-powerful friend looking out for me and loving me whenever the rest of the world was being uncaring or down-right nasty to me, but I just couldn’t swallow the idea of eternal damnation, and after the first cracks started it just all fell apart. Now I am agnostic, and the very idea that someone should pay for someone else’s salvation instead of them having to earn it is fairly appalling to me, or it would be if I believed in salvation. I’d LIKE to believe in karma, reincarnation, the universe being ordered somehow and some grand design, etc. but I don’t. I don’t allow myself to believe in things just because they would make me feel good. That’s called being delusional. It’s a mental illness. What I do believe in is that if humanity could get over this collective mental illness we might be better off. My motto is ‘Live As If There Is No God’. This does not mean that you can do anything you please, because there’s no God watching and waiting to punish you. Frankly if you are doing good only because you fear going to hell, you are sadly immature. It means we should all live for one another, and for future generations, instead of just leaving it to God or Fate or whatever to take care of things we were too lazy, irresponsible, greedy or stupid to do right.
I came very close right now after seeing posts from FinnAgain about Hamas, and from Starving Artist about how great America is and how it’s bringing freedom to the world.
I’ve heard it said that the devil runs this world, and well it’s times like these that I almost believe it to be true, when people can look at other human beings and truly believe that they are evil, that they are their enemy, that killing them is justified and the right thing to do.
I just don’t understand how someone can look at another human being and see a monster so wholly and completely that they are completely unable to empathize with the position of the other person.
I wouldn’t so much say that it affects my faith in God, because my faith in God has very little to do with a certain outcome, but it has definitely shaken my faith in humanity, because I know there are so many factions willing to look across the river at some other faction and declare them evil.
I always thought that Armageddon was avoidable, but when I read some of the posts I see here sometimes villifying the enemy and puffing up the heroism of their own side, it almost seems inevitable.
The biggest irony I know in life is something that Sun Tzu puts into the greatest perspective, and that is that a true warrior can empathize with their enemy. If the people that I see clamoring the loudest for war, had the least bit of the warrior in them, they would have a much greater empathy for those that they consider their enemy.
I grew up believing in a personal and involved God. I was brought up in the Lutheran church (ELCA, which is pretty mainstream) and although I quit going to church when I was a teenager and I was always on the liberal side of Christianity, I still believed in God. I was married in a Methodist church, and when I had children, I joined the Methodist church and was an active member for over a decade.
Then one day when I was in my mid-thirties, for no apparent reason, I stopped believing in God. There was a definite moment when I was praying and suddenly realized that I was talking to myself. And although I continued to attend church along with my children, that was that. There was no way I could talk myself into believing in God again.
I’ve quit going to church because it started to seem hypocritical as well as pointless, although I still think that Christianity in its purest form is a worthwhile ideology. I suppose I deal with the knowledge (and it’s knowledge to me, not belief) that there is no God by trying to realize that what is there is enough. The universe is infinite; I don’t need to believe in an omnipotent Creator to appreciate the awesome glory of that fact.
I do not see faith as something to be lost! One just changes their mind about what they believed in and take up new beliefs that seem to be of more help than the one they had ,were raised in ,or feel a need for comfort. It is for some people finding what they believed in before now doesn’t make sense. People change religions,take up and drop them they do not lose Faith they move on. It is like a dollar you spent it wasn’t lost just changed for something you want,or needed.
Yes. I have lost the faith I once had. I’m still holding on to a thread of it however because the alternative of man being ultimately in charge of his and every other species’ destiny scares the living shit out of me. I’d rather have the all wise , all powerful, all loving God that I can talk to that is going to make everything right in the end.
Perhaps I’m wiser now, but fearful. Nuclear weapons, global warming, rapid extinction of forest and species, rape of the oceans, depletion of resources etc. and no one to declare that enough is enough.
That is very intelligent, and something I completely agree with. Life has gotten so much better since the scientific revolutions of the 18th & 17th centuries. We depended on god for help for centuries before that and nothing happened. Even now people in the Muslim world depend on God to protect them from the Americans, and then we overthrow Iraq in 3 weeks. We used to pray to god to end the Black Plague and nothing happened. It breaks my heart to imagine all those helpless people begging god for help and getting nowhere when plague or famine hit in history. Now we understand black plague is caused by the bacteria yersinia pestis that uses fleas as a vector. The reason I’m devoting my life to science (even though I’m not really smart enough to be anything more than a low/medium level researcher, but that is still something) is because of this belief, that once you reject god you realize we have to depend on each other for education, comfort, purpose and help. The idea that we exist due to evolution instead of a benevolent god is alot more comforting because it makes it alot easier to understand what the right thing to do it (promote human rights, science, education, charity and try to be a good person). With the idea of god there is no clue what the right thing to do is. Bin Ladin thinks it is starting an Islamic caliphate. Hindus believe it is meditating in caves. Buddhists think it is non-violence. Christians think it is accepting Jesus. And those are just the popular religion, there are endless smaller religions and cults with totally different ideas on what god wants.
I have lost and (sadly) regained my faith. I dislike my faith and the idea that we should be following some unexplained purpose in life or the idea of trying to rectify a benevolent god with a world where horrid evil is possible. I think faith is a delusion that prevents me from living in reality but I can’t just ‘let go’ of it anymore than someone with an anxiety disorder can stop feeling anxious even if they logically know their anxiety is hurting quality of life and not based on anything.
I do believe consciousness survives death though, but I don’t really believe in a creator god. Over time I’ll kill my faith off.
That’s several people now who have expressed the notion that it’s better not to have faith, because having faith (in God, or Fate, or whatever) means shirking responsibility for your own life and your contribution to the world. But that’s not necessarily so; it depends on what kind of faith you have, or on what/whom you have faith in. With the kind of faith described in the OP, and that many people have, I can see how such faith would go along with immaturity or irresponsibility. But the answer isn’t less faith, but better faith.
Whether or not you believe in God, it takes faith to believe that there is a “right thing to do,” that we do have responsibilities, that what we do matters. I’m glad you haven’t lost that faith, but it is possible to lose it. Personally, I find it easier to reconcile a belief in such things with a belief that God does exist than with a belief that God doesn’t.
I don’t see anything at all incompatible between faith in God and science, or living in reality, or people looking out for one another.
When I’m hungry, I don’t pray to God for a sandwich. I go to the kitchen and make one for myself. (But I really should thank God for making it possible for me to do so.)
I’d like to hear why you feel that way. Why is it easier to reconcile a belief in doing the right thing with believing in a god? Because my observations on religion have been that they are a shortcut to thinking. Sadly, most people seem to fall back on whatever dogma they are taught instead of reasoning things out for themselves, and the very idea that there is a supreme being seems to me a way of abdicating responsibility.
I grew up in a very conservative Baptist family. On the whole they are good people. But their faith in certain things makes them extremely close-minded. They believe Jesus is coming back very soon now, therefore they are not the least bit concerned about global warming, overpopulation, limited resources, nuclear proliferation or anything like that. Jesus is going to fix everything when he gets here, and besides, they are all going to be caught up in the rapture before things really go to hell anyhow. I’m dead serious. That’s what they believe. They also deep down believe they are better than other people, like African Americans(who they think are the descendents of Ham and cursed by God to servitude) and heathens who will be cast into the fiery lake for their unbelief. They also ascribe to the Calvinist philosophy that anyone who is poor must deserve to be, because prosperity is a sign of God’s approval. They don’t ever think about the things they believe, because it is so completely embedded.
I suppose it is possible, maybe even probable, that unbelievers also have some kind of dogma or shortcuts to thinking. I live in the bible belt and haven’t personally met enough of them to form an overall opinion, but I my observations of agnostics and atheists online are that they are a lot less likely to try to end a debate with ‘because the bible says so’ or ‘that’s just the way things are’. My overall impression is that most people who don’t believe in God are people who reasoned their way out of a religion, not people who simply weren’t taught one.
Sorry about rambling on. I would like to understand why you think that it is easier to reconcile a belief in God with the ideas of doing the right thing.
One reason is that, in order for there to be a “right thing to do”—in order for “right” or “good” to mean anything beyond just what happens to appeal to me—there has to be a moral structure to the universe. And if the universe was created by a moral Creator, I can see how it could have such a moral structure, moreso than if the universe just happened to exist.
Another reason is that, if God exists, then there is Someone besides myself who knows, and cares, what I do. Maybe this means God will reward right and punish wrong, either here or hereafter, either directly or by setting up the world in such a way that people tend to reap what they sow. Or maybe it just means I have the power of pleasing or displeasing God, of making him glad or letting him down. Either way, it’s an additional motivation to do what’s right, over and above the motivations I share with nonbelievers.
It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. We talk about having a responsibility to someone (like a public servant who has a responsibility to the people he serves, or a person having a responsibility to their family). Along with belief in God is the belief that we have a responsibility to God.
However, every one of these beliefs could be refuted from within religion—specifically Christianity—itself. Very often religion does enforce the status quo, especially in places like the Bible Belt where there is a prevailing “default religion”; but religion can also be countercultural and challenge the conventional wisdom. (Certainly Jesus did his share of this!) I don’t see the conflict so much between belief and unbelief as between beliefs in different things; not between religion and irreligion but between what, if it didn’t sound so dogmatic, I might call “right religion” and “wrong religion.”
One more thought. There are lots of people out there whose behavior is influenced by their parents, but in different ways. Some are spoiled, immature, and irresponsible, because they believe their parents will give them everything they need and bail them out of any messes they might get themselves into. Some have parents who try to rigidly control their lives, laying down rules and limits and sternly meting out punishments. And some have parents who want them to live a good life, who have taught them by word and by example how to do that, and who now take a mostly hands-off approach. Likewise, among people who believe they have a Heavenly Father, you’ll find different ideas of what they believe that Heavenly Father’s role to be (and whether they expect Him to act like the father of a 3-year-old or of a 33-year-old).
Ah. If I understand you correctly, you are saying you believe in God because you want to, because it makes you feel better about your role in the scheme of the universe. I can sympathize. I would like to believe that myself. And since you seem to be a nice person and from what I can tell you are tolerant of others, I am inclined to say whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right. However, I do feel obligated to say that the habit of believing what you want can lead to disaster. For instance, I was watching specials this weekend about the Challenger space shuttle and what had gone wrong. While the o-rings failure was the cause of the explosion, ultimately the cause of the loss of life was that NASA and the managment types of their contractors made a decision to ignore their engineers. They felt they were under a lot of pressure to get their lauch up and they wanted to believe that everything would be okay. They were wrong.
Human beings are sadly prone to sloppy thinking and false pattern recognition anyhow. I can’t help but think that it is better to be firmly on guard against this kind of thing, lest it crop up in circumstances when the results can do damage.
Everything has a cause. Even the faihful believe that. The non-faithful accept the fact that the real cause may not ever be known by them.
No one said the cause of everything was you. The idea is that there is no one central cause of anything. Neither you, nor fate, nor some mysterious being.
I grew up atheist, and have had many bouts with faith over my life. What always leads me happily away from it again is the notion that when horrible things happen, I’m suppose to figure out what some nebulous entity “means” by bringing it about. Annoys the crap out of me after a short while.
My sister died of brain cancer two years ago, one that had no known physical cause. I would drive myself even crazier that it already made me if I felt compelled to suss out what the “meaning” or “plan” was behind this event that caused so many people so much grief. It is very comforting to be able to duly note that spirit-crushingly awful things can happen in this world for no known reason whatsoever, and move on as best I can from there.
So Obsidian… as you can see a lot of people have lost their faith… or never had it (me). Apparently we lead normal lives. Its not as comforting as the church going one… but not too bad. Overall its not much fun… hehe… but at least its rational.