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Theists make much about "choosing to believe" but the only chosen beliefs are those that are baseless or at least inherently unsubstantiatable. That is tantamount to make-believe. If you truly base your beliefs on evidence and logic, then you don't choose your beliefs; they choose you.
I believed those doctrines because it's what I taught, it's all I knew, and I assumed the adults in my life knew what they were on about. It wasn't until I was old enough to reason and became more informed about the world that belief was necessarily replaced by doubt. For many years I assumed I'd eventually get it sorted, but when I realized that reality didn't at all work like I was taught to "believe" it to work ... it all came unglued.
So I could post hoc wonder if I ever believed at all, as you suggest ... I don't tend to see it that way, I wasn't faking it or trying to "fake it until I made it" ... it was unforced at first because I was a child and my credulousness was encouraged by everyone in my environment. In this one limited sense I never truly believed: I never based my belief on anything but hearsay from the holy book and its teachers. But that seems like a pointless distinction because by that logic, none of our evangelical posters here "truly believe" either; they were just way more successful than I at compartmentalizing away any line of reasoning contrary to the party line, in spite of there being no solid basis to do so.
Also if your life is sufficiently lucky and your ability to rationalize is great enough, you may be sufficiently comfortable and see no reason to "disturb the force".
But I can pose a similar question back to that atheist: Did *you* ever consider other religions before deciding to ditch Christianity?"
Sure did. Vedanta Hinduism and Zen Buddhism being the main ones. Even went through a fairly brief reincarnation phase, absent the idea that there was a deity controlling the process.
By the time I was 30 or so, came to the reluctant conclusion that they all shared the same problem - human beings! Although I still rely on many Zen ideas about the nature of the universe to guide my thinking.
I did not even know (or think) about them as concepts.
Yeah, I'm in that camp as well. Just believed that Jesus died for my sins... and rose again to prove he was God. Thought that the Bible stories were all true. Didn't get much past that.
I guess we did believe in "faith"... but "faith without works is dead".
Never thought how much those two concepts conflicted with each other.
Now I realize that the only "living" faith is attached to works...therefore works are a part of the deal.
I suspect that answers will differ depending on what religion the commenter was brought up in.
Protestant churches tend to lean on the idea of "justification by faith alone", and they claim that it is the true lesson from the Bible based on what they find in one line in the New Testament.
Catholics teach that this is wrong, and they, predictably, have found another line in the Bible that says something like if you have faith without good works, your faith is nothing.
The very same lines appear in the bibles that the Protestants and the Catholics read and claim to adhere to. I was raised in the Catholic church, so naturally the Catholic version seems more logical to me. Even not being a Catholic, I am inclined to think that holding a set of beliefs without acting on them will never make you a good person.
My tribe taught both ... or made an attempt at balance in both. Salvation by faith, but works as the evidence of genuine faith ... the works don't save you but if they don't come them there can't have been faith.
It seems that many atheists here used to be Christians. My question is: While practicing Christianity, did you believe in Sola Scriptura and/or "Faith ALONE"?
That's likely because most people here are American and therefore most likely to be raised in some form of Christianity.
You are one of those extremely rare theists with an actual desire to understand the likes of me, so your question deserves a thoughtful response IMO.
I actually DID do a survey of other sects and religions before making my final decision, but you must understand that I did not leave because of some malfunction over the doctrines you mention. My realization was that religious faith (belief without a requirement of substantiating evidence) is a failed epistemology. And when I looked at alternative religions, I saw that they all had the same exact meta-problem.
Well, thank you for the compliment, and for considering me 'worthy' of one of your typically wonderfully fashioned responses.
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If in some alternate universe I had been born to a less authoritarian denomination, my expectations might have been more realistic and I would not have been as turned off.
When I first posted my question, it didn't really sit well with me. It's like, I wasn't really asking what I should be asking. Sola Scriptura and Faith ALONE definitely played a part, because it seemed that those who either ONCE adhered to those doctrines did come from a more 'authoritarian denomination' or 'discipline'.
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But I was from a young age (less than 6 when I converted) fed this triumphalist notion of the "victorious Christian life" that was supposed to be always joyful and an invariably coherent explanation of my lived experience. It was supposed to be a vital, living faith that provided solace and strength and all that kind of thing. I found it anything but.
Having been raised Catholic (whatever THAT meant ), I never experienced that.
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God did not seem to answer even the most carefully crafted and selfless prayer, for those things I desperately needed his intervention concerning. Various tragedies helped me along in that thinking ... so another characteristic of an alternate universe where Mordant is still a theist might just involve more dumb good luck. All of these things would have provided me with a less leaky abstraction and less reason to scrutinize my assumptions.
Prayer wasn't always part of my life like it is now. Prayer used to be the Our Father...the Hail Mary...The Rosary...the typical 'canned' prayers-by-rote that most Catholics learn by the 2nd grade. The only praying my family did was before eating dinner and observing my grandmother praying her Rosary.
Oh, but sin and hell were mentioned quite often, and that came from those who didn't even own a bible!
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Another thing might be connected to the level of social support some religions provide. Judaism has always been impressive to me in this regard. There's a young observant Jewish couple across the street from me and they both strike me as some of the most honest, kind, and real people I've encountered, and their rich traditions and shared rituals provide a sense of community for them that I simply do not have any experience of -- one time during the pandemic they hosted a Seder on their front porch and it was really cool to see all these young people in N95 masks doing the traditional toasts and such. By contrast, the churches I grew up in were inherently full of posers, fakers and hypocrites ... because you could not really emphasize god's righteous indignation at our depraved selves without having to affect a level of piousness you don't really possess, to make yourself look more right-eous than others, generally at their expense.
I hear ya. I lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, and I had mostly Jewish friends. Their approach to their faith was so much...warmer...than the few I knew to be Catholic/non-Catholic Christians.
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So if I had something that actually nurtured me, provided a real sense of refuge, had lower / more realistic expectations, and fellow-travelers who really cared about me and that I could care about, as well as an ethos of humility and respect for others ... and if I were not obligated to take the whole thing with an arrogant seriousness that I had all the answers ... I might still for all I know be religious -- for some given value of religious. I might have salvaged some sort of god concept from it that I could reconcile with at least my personal lived experience -- though I think events of the past couple of decades would find me still struggling to see my faith as an antidote to all the cruelty and unforced errors in human society generally.
Sure. And while I don't necessarily share your view, I can certainly understand it.
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To summarize then, Sola Scripture and salvation by faith alone really didn't have any bearing on my apostasy. In fact it's fair to say I have no problem with them to this day, if hypothetically I still believed any of it. I think there are even some advantages to those doctrines. But no, my malfunction was that my faith did not provide me coherence and understanding, nor anything like the utter clarity it professed to convey ... and I found that letting go of the legends and belief in some form of immortality to be a small price to pay for a way to reset my expectations, to not see things that happened to me as somehow personal and directed, as either a reward for good behavior or some sort of sadistic punishment for personal failings ... I don't have to work overtime to rationalize with my burnt-out little "rationalizer" that doesn't work very well any more, as in, hardly at all.
O.k. I get that.
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So the crazy wife, the dead wife, the dead son, the dead brother ... these were just things that happened that I didn't like. They didn't MEAN anything ... as in some kind of message or "test" from the gods, somehow personal and directed toward me.
So, were you brought up to believe that these things that happened in your life were some kind of 'message or test' from God? I mean, is that what you were taught?
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Theists often wonder how atheists live without meaning ... well we don't actually but in this specific sense that we don't assign meaning and purpose and agency where they don't actually apply, is liberating rather than a source of dismay. I have grieved as a Christian and I have grieved as an Atheist and I'm here to tell you, it was no picnic either way but as an unbeliever I was spared all the "why" questions -- why me, why him, why now, where did I fail, where did they fail, if only this or that; how can god still be loving and all powerful and all knowing and allow this, etc. And that kind of nonsense makes grief and sorrow exponentially worse, not better. I am WAY better off without it. "Why" questions might as well be "why not" questions. I now understand life's speed bumps and pot holes as the human condition, not some orchestrated play with me as the central character.
And apart from the vicissitudes of life -- in just ordinary everyday living I am a far more calm, equanimous, centered person than I ever as as a god-botherer. YMMV.
I don't see atheists as "living without meaning." To me, that would be like saying that atheists just do what they want...'sin' upon 'sin'...living for themselves devoid of love. I'll say it one more time, that I believe there are at least SOME atheists who may get into Heaven before some believers.
Thanks for the 'fireside' chat, Mordant. Always a pleasure with you...
When I first posted my question, it didn't really sit well with me. It's like, I wasn't really asking what I should be asking. Sola Scriptura and Faith ALONE definitely played a part, because it seemed that those who either ONCE adhered to those doctrines did come from a more 'authoritarian denomination' or 'discipline'.
There's probably something of an association there, so the doctrines would be the symptoms rather than the actual cause (authoritarian religion in this case).
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Originally Posted by Mink57
Prayer wasn't always part of my life like it is now. Prayer used to be the Our Father...the Hail Mary...The Rosary...the typical 'canned' prayers-by-rote that most Catholics learn by the 2nd grade. The only praying my family did was before eating dinner and observing my grandmother praying her Rosary.
We were up front about prayer being mindful and specific and anything but rote. I DO think that is one of the strengths of evangelical ideology at least in theory.
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Originally Posted by Mink57
I hear ya. I lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, and I had mostly Jewish friends. Their approach to their faith was so much...warmer...than the few I knew to be Catholic/non-Catholic Christians.
This is truer, in the more "reform" Jewish community. Even very conservative Jews are surprisingly chill in some ways about live-and-let-live coexistence with the unenlightened whether Jew or Gentile compare to, say, a Christian or certainly a Muslim fundamentalist ... but the more conservative they are the more ruthlessly "eye for an eye" they can be.
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Originally Posted by Mink57
So, were you brought up to believe that these things that happened in your life were some kind of 'message or test' from God? I mean, is that what you were taught?
Not exclusively, but mostly. The triumphalism said that "real" Christians(tm) don't have huge intractable personal problems; if they do, they are a result of secret sin, insufficient piety, god pushing you through adversity to a deeper dependence on him (ironically while he's acting undependable) or the ever-popular "god's Mysterious Ways". Once in awhile they would shake their head and say we don't understand all the why's, but they did not offer any real comfort in the face of that other than that you have to defer all unresolved "loose ends" in life to somewhere in the afterlife. And you can only do that up to a certain point -- or at least that was true of me.
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Originally Posted by Mink57
I don't see atheists as "living without meaning." To me, that would be like saying that atheists just do what they want...'sin' upon 'sin'...living for themselves devoid of love. I'll say it one more time, that I believe there are at least SOME atheists who may get into Heaven before some believers.
Many theists do think that, but I didn't have you in mind with that remark.
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Originally Posted by Mink57
Thanks for the 'fireside' chat, Mordant. Always a pleasure with you...
1 Corinthians 13:11 "when I was a child, I thought like a child" then I grew up and gave Religion all of them the heave ho!
Now at 70 years if age, I feel and believe myself to be to be just as godless as I did in my 20's and 30's, in fact probably more so!
I find religion, all religions, repugnant, unintellectual, grossly responsible for far too many anti humanistic actions!
I think the other thing about it is that when you get our age...
They can't throw that "you don't believe because you just want to sin" in your face.... Unfortunately.
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Having been raised Catholic (whatever THAT meant 
), I never experienced that. 
