To religious people, are you also somewhat skeptical?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’m Jewish. I believe in G-d. I believe I have some special purpose(almost everybody does).

I am extremely skeptical. What I have seen and experienced is enough for me. But I recognize it does not hold up as either scientific or legal evidence. I would consider anybody swayed by my recounting these events to be an idiot. You believe the miraculous just because some crazy man tells you it happened?

I’ve never come across the Chesterton quote before. I arrived at something similar years ago. You can see me being a skeptic in various GD threads (especially the Lktt ones). I am a fan of James Randi, and of Penn and Teller’s work in the cause of skepticism.

22

I would say that I am moderately religious, but also very skeptical. It isn’t that I don’t believe that God can’t do miracles, or even that he doesn’t. I think he is consistently doing all kinds of things that we are mostly unaware of, and most of the things that people get hyped up about I don’t think are all that divine anyway… “I saw Jesus in my coffee today.” kind of things I just sort of smile politely and wonder why that would be so miraculous. But “My dad woke up from a 12-year coma and the doctors said he will live a full and healthy life.” kind of things are certainly miraculous in my mind.

I think a lot of people, regardless of their religiousness, are just put off by the word “miracle,” maybe for lack of a way to define the miraculous-ness of one event versus another.

My biggest skepticism though is over ghosts. Give me a break.

23

I have never been sure which it is. Is my faith so strong that God bless me often, or it because I need a lot of encouragement the he bless me?

24

I’m pretty skeptical, perhaps too much so. My general mindset when people try to claim that God did anything is that they are full of crap. I suspect this has more to do with people being full of crap than God not doing anything or God being full of crap. (Er, meaning I don’t think God is full of crap. That thought was rather poorly worded.)

My favorite part is when people try to claim that anything “bad” happening to them must be the Devil’s work. I had trouble paying attention to the preacher (who, btw, was visiting and sounded like the worst used car salesman you’ve ever met), and it was automatically suggested that the Devil was trying to keep me from paying attention. No, I rather suspect that I just didn’t want to listen. Happens to me in my college classes all the time, and I don’t think that you’d suggest the Devil has anything to do with that.

I believe in God, and I believe that He does, on occasion do things to influence both people and events. However, I don’t believe that this is as commonplace as some would suggest, and I do believe that many of these events can be explained by either human intervention or scientific phenomena.

25

Yup. Not skeptical.

26

I’ve seen enough stuff to believe that there are things that can’t be explained logically. But that doesn’t mean that I believe that everything that can’t be explained logically is some sort of divine intervention.

Sometimes something happens that makes you believe, and sometimes something happens that makes you say “Hmmm. How about that?”

27

This, exactly this…right down to the Chesterton quote.

28

I’m a Catholic, I have only been one for about 5 years. I was baptized a baptist when I was about 10 years old. I am 45 now. I had a less than stellar childhood, experiencing much abuse and hate in my early teen years, leading me to a life of crime in my late teen’s through 30’s. I work every day to rid myself of the hate and violence that I grew to cherish in the years in between. It doesn’t appear to be working. I still wan’t to beat people senseless. At least I am able to stop myself from doing so, though the feeling is still there. Such is what I have wrought. I still look to my man Jesus, though I can see from his teachings he was also a man. And men have decisions to make. Not always easy, but decisions that need to be made none the less. And please don’t assume I dare to compare myself to Him. Only that it is easy to see he too, did not always want to take the right way. Let me offer an example. When he asks his father, let this cup pass from me, he knew full well it was the only way.

All I can say is I’ll see. Just like everyone else. Which always makes me laugh.

And probably lots of you jokers too.

29

I totally agree. Galileo said “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

30

I am conservative evangelical who is currently attending seminary. I consider myself pretty skeptical, and at times it gets me into trouble.
-I believe that miracles can happen, but they do not happen often, God set this world up to run in a certain way, and miraculous occurrences are rare.

  • I think prayer is good, and we should pray, but I think it affects the one praying more than God.
  • God in his sovereignty has very little need in overt miracles

edited to add:
You might see how this could get me into trouble. I hear preacher speak all the time about how they saw this or that miracle happen. It is like anything that happens good to them is a miracle… and I sometimes criticize that. I have had many arguments will classmates about such topics.

31

Excellent quote! I had never heard it before.

32

A skeptic means a person who has doubt. (Check the dictionary if you’re skeptical of that definition.) As such, it’s very broadly defined.

When I was eighteen or thereabouts, I automatically rejected any claims of the miraculous, divine, or supernatural. They were the confused rantings of ignorant people and that was that. I automatically accepted anything coming from “legitimate” authorities, which meant people bearing Ph.D.'s and working in universities. (Except when such people reached conclusions that I didn’t want to accept, in which case I mainly ignored them.)

Nowadays I try to be open-minded about claims of the supernatural, whether religious or not. If someone claims to have seen an angel, who am I to say they didn’t? When the clowns with Ph.D.'s make bizarre claims, that when I grow doubtful.

Make of it what you will. I choose to see myself as being quite naive back then, and extremely skeptical now.

33

I think of a skeptic not as someone who doubts, but as someone who questions. A consistent general philosophy of doubt would of necessity doubt itself. The contradiction would effectively nullify the premise.

So, in the sense of someone who questions, I am definitely that. I question my faith on practically a daily basis, something that in my reading of scripture, we are called on to do. I don’t really ever find myself doubting God, but I’m constantly asking Him why.

34

Count me in as someone who frequently rolls his eyeball during sermons when the preachers go really into the extreme.

I have somewhat become agnostic, and skeptical as well, especially when it comes to abstract things like “in Christ you can conquer everything!” and “pray and everything you will be all right!”. I roll my eyeball at the slot machine mentality some (many? most?) Christians have regarding prayer and the religious lives. Especially when it comes to healing rallies.

Likewise, doomsday preachers and people trying to predict the end days, as well as finding enemies everywhere (in abortion movements, in evolution and etc.) gets me crazy too. That’s trench warfare, not what Christ wants. In the gospels, he only directly attacked one group of people, the Pharisees, and doesn’t give a damn whether his followers are tax collectors, prostitutes, doctors, soldiers and etc. Geez, he didn’t even do nothing against the Roman Empire. There’s just something different between His approach and most churches’ approach.

I also am skeptical that anything by itself can be “evil” or a tool of Satan. I thought Christ was explicit enough when He says it is when come out from the heart of men that is evil, not what that had gone inside.

Count me in as one of the group of people who think Israel does stuff that are wrong, all lot of time. Some of my Christian preachers are totally convinced that what is happening in Israel is utlra-important. I look at the bloodshed and strife in the region and figure that in the grand scheme of thing, God may want a state of Israel, but he didn’t want that much mess. In short, human beings messed up. How many Christians were killed and displaced because of the fighting?

I am also skeptical about what most Christians coin as God’s will. When a baby fell through a window and die, is that God’s will? Think some more, man, and don’t just throw that term around. To people who are suffering, wrong usage of that term can be painful.

I am also agnostic about truth. If any Christians tell me “I am totally convinced that, by the Bible, this and that”, I just shrug. Prove it to me – if it is just a “prompting by the Holy Spirit”, be prepared that I would say it doesn’t apply to me, though I will respect your decision, and may even try to argue you out of it if it is dumb enough.

I don’t think the Bible is meant to explain anything else but how to live spiritually. Don’t try to cramp it into science or contemporary life-style wholesale. Man, most of that stuff has to be read in context. The Bible did mention that woman must cover their head at communion. How many people do that now? Yet at the same time they have no problem lifting passages that support their agenda. Selective reading at its best.

I can go on and go on; but one thing is certain is I am all in flavor of just simplifying my faith to the barest essentials. Last time, Christianity could cut through cultural and racial barriers. Now, it is a cultural and racial barrier.

35

Speaking of Chesterton…

I try to remain both open-minded and skeptical. I don’t rule out the possibility of miracles, angels, faith-healings, etc., but I’ve never personally witnessed one, and I don’t believe that all who claim they have actually have.

My response to claims of encounters with the supernatural, or miraculous events (maybe like those described by Snnipe 70E), are that they could be one of the following, and without knowing more I can’t rule any of the possibilities out:
(1) The person is being less than truthful
(2) The person is being truthful about what they think* happened, but what actually occured was something different
(3) It actually happened as claimed, but there is a natural, non-miraculous explanation
(4) Something miraculous actually did occur.