You might want to start a journal over on livejournal or diaryland. Thread drift is pretty much inevitable on issues like this.
I agree with those who say that it may not be as black and white as choosing between fundamentalist Christian or “Fundamentalist atheist” (so to speak). If you find that a belief in God is comforting to you during the hard times in life, good for you.
Perhaps this is just another example of the very common phenomenon of someone’s passionate convictions as a youngster becoming more nuanced and mellow with the experiences of getting older. Kind of like how my darling boyfriend used to consider himself a communist when he was a teen but has more nuanced views on government now that he has a grown up job with the accompanying taxes.
True. However I think the OP means he doesn’t want the thread to turn into an argument about whether or not faith is rational or whether there is or is not a God. Those topics belong in Great Debates. If people want to discuss the OP’s experiences and their own, that’s an MPSIMS thread.
One should be able to believe as they wish,I do not think a person loses it’s faith; if one sees things differently. Just like one doesn’t lose it’s faith in Santa Clause.
Faith is just that. It is a help to some and like others it isn’t needed. A woman can believe her husband is faithful and it may or may not be true. The one thing that changed my beliefs was Matthew chapter 16 where Jesus promises to return in His glory with all His angels and some standing there would not see death until it was fullfilled.There are no 2000 year old people here, so I figured He was mistaken, or misquoted.
I know many people who are helped by their faith and some who are fanatic. Faith is a personal thing and each person should be able to believe as they wish as long as they do not use it like some radicals do (or did) to cause other’s harm.
Faith is about incomplete knowledge and uncertainty, not ignoring evidence. Reasoning is a part of an active faith. Any reasonable person is constantly updating their beliefs as they learn new things. Unless you stop learning new things, faith is constantly changing.
Myself also, not once have I felt any need to pray or think that external spiritual forces selectively intervened. It was pure “oh shit, I almost died” and what was most emotionally shaking to me was how little control I have over the larger random events of the environment around me.
It’s very interesting to me how the OP’s belief-pendulum automatically swung the other way when facing near death though, with the assumption that the event was either personally selected for him by a higher power, or that a higher power could defer slecting him for such events in the future.
When I was in the ambulance on the way to the hospital for an emergency c-section, where five minutes would have made the difference between my daughter’s living and dying, I remember thinking that I was the lone atheist in the foxhole. I didn’t pray, because I knew then it was pointless. After it was all over I felt strangely proud of the security of my convictions (or lack thereof, I suppose). I wonder if I would have felt the same way had she not survived, or had the lack of oxygen caused serious brain damage.
Sorry for what you and your family are going through, Determinist.
A little more from the foxholes: my younger brother has been dealing with cancer for more than two years and never considered adopting any kind of faith. The rest of my family hasn’t either. I’ve found religion in a deliberately unconventional way, at the times it’s useful.
