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If I recall, you’re fairly young, correct? It’s a big part of coming into your own and then exploring whether the beliefs you were raised on are authentic to you. That’s a good and healthy thing
I don't know where I am with it all. Struggling for sure. I feel almost like a nihilist lately.
With the death of my mother the way she went out - to see my dad have lost her like the way he did, it's been tough on my faith.
I honestly don't know. When I've been at my lowest though faith/Christianity/God has all I felt I had left. Material things don't mean as much to me - it's all going to be gone in the end. Even every person I walk past and interact with will be gone soon. Are we all going to an eternal "box/grave"? ALL of us? To have 100 billion people on earth trampling on our graves and progressing on into some futuristic world?
I pissed away 10 years of my life and I will not forgive myself for it. I don't think I'm going to find a partner now so I don't know what's going to happen with me. There are too many things I can't forgive myself for.
I will be dust soon enough...sooner rather than later. We all will be. I asked Christ to come in to my heart. That was all I could do. I'd rather have at least that much in a world so far gone than to have nothing at all, even if it seems contrived or "fake".
Quite a few doubters or deconverts go through this phase. You come out of it eventually, and make the most of the time you have. I rarely hear of people going back to religion, even though the desperately want to. But those who have to and find some peace, then I'm happy they found it.
Even if they have to take up with some wooish cult or other. There'a always someone ready to peddle you their own fave belief.
As to the trampling the graves of all those who went before, .. we are all star -matter, dead or alive.
Keep talking if you like. Getting laid might help. It' amazing how an affair will get you out of the blues.
I also am in substantial agreement with it. Although I would make a fairly large point about the two almost diametrically opposite meanings of "faith" in English. There is the colloquial use, which basically means "trust based on experience or knowledge", such as that I have faith in my wife's faithfulness. But this is really a synonym for "trust" and when I talk about faith, I use "trust" for that sense and "religious faith" for the theological sense of faith, which is that "blind faith" or belief in asserted truth based on something other than substantiating evidence or logic -- such as authority of the asserter, being part of a community of people who share the belief and afford you belonging based on the shared belief, personal need or desire for it to be true, etc.
In my experience, apologists tend to conflate these two meanings in an attempt to elevate the credibility of religious faith. For example, they often try to equate sitting on a chair and "having faith" that it will hold you up without first examining it, with religious faith. The problem is that the objects of colloquial faith (trust) actually exist (chairs, people and their behaviors, etc), and people have actual empirical experience with them. The objects of religious faith are always invisible and generally supernatural (outside or above nature) and therefore (and this is key) inherently un-falsifiable and therefore non-[dis]provable and outside the province of critical thinking.
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Originally Posted by Age-enduring
The part i think is intriguing is how it separates reason from blind faith. I think it would be a great stretch to say that believers do not reason, or think about their belief systems. But there's no getting away from that fundamental nugget of blind faith.
I think believers think about their faith. If they reasoned about it I think it would undermine their faith. Or at least if they reasoned in a disciplined, self-aware, critical, skeptical manner. After all if religious faith points to truth, it would have zero problem holding up to scrutiny, even the scrutiny of a practiced skeptic. Yet ... skeptical, critical thinking is seen more as an existential threat in practice, particularly by literalist / inerrantist types. I wonder why that would be?
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Originally Posted by Age-enduring
Maybe you can help me decide whether I have that with respect to the following example...? As I was re-reading your post and then the article on the flawed epistemology of faith, I had the story of Jesus enter my mind where he was saying, "if you don't believe in me because of what I say at least believe because of the miracles". I would say I believe what he said was true and also the miracles he did actually occurred. What proportion of that is blind unreasoned faith, and what proportion may be evidentially reasoned in terms of the worldwide legacy of faith/belief and signs/wonders performed since JC was around...?
My late, believing, prior wife gave much credence to this. She felt that there must, for example, be an afterlife because so many people, today and throughout history, embrace this as truth. To her credit, she did not make this a bone of contention in our relationship, but I could never see this as anything other than an argument from popularity. That an old set of documents describes a fabulist mythos about Jesus, and that lots of people over the past two thousand years believe it literally happened, has nothing whatever to do with whether or not it actually is likely to have occurred. Any more than the fact that over the millennia, a lot of people believe it to be symbolic / allegorical stories, and a lot of other people simply don't believe it at all. In fact, the majority of humanity has never believed it at all. By the most charitable definition of Christianity (cultural self-identification as Christian), never more than one-third of all the humans in existence has ever believed in the evangel. Somehow this little factoid is never cited by people heralding "a worldwide legacy of belief" in these matters.
To me the gospel accounts represent things we want / need to be true and are willing to be credulous about, because it plays to certain archetypes and features of the human condition, particularly our fear and loathing of our own mortality. And it has evolved into a widely influential set of interlocking and self-reinforcing memes. It would be a fool's errand to suggest it's not important or successful as a belief-system. But I do not find its truth claims credible just the same.
Especially when you consider what is REALLY the most prominent reason you or anyone else adheres to Christianity or any other religion: it's what your family of origin believed. If you had been born in Tibet before the Chinese took over, you'd likely be a Tibetan Buddhist. If you'd been born in rural Saudi Arabia you would almost certainly be a Wahhabi Muslim. And so forth.
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Originally Posted by Age-enduring
On the other point, I just don't accept authority as legitimate if it doesn't serve people. I don't go around making life intentionally hard for myself, with respect to civil or supposed spiritual authority, but i think Ghandi had it right, with peaceful resistance. ....I'd go as far as to say that this resistance is on the increase, and will increase in the next few years as people rise up and reject illegitimate authority, both civil and spiritual, and the people of the earth will enter a new era, maybe even of mutual something or other.
One can only hope. I do share your optimism in the abstract -- I think that inclusiveness, empathy, and lovingkindness are the only sustainable way forward, that anything short of that is an unsustainable dead-end in the long run. The open question for me is whether the current death throes of authoritarianism and tribalism heralds the imminent collapse of such systems as widely influential in human society -- or if they are an abreaction to the advance of egalitarianism that will cause a costly regression and maybe even a dystopian dark ages. There are plausible, if somewhat "reachy", scenarios that it could even spell the end of the civil society as we know it, or even of the species itself.
The open question is whether these noble aspirations have anything added to them by Christianity (or Islam, or Confucianism, or whatever your preferred religious affiliation). It's my view that religious systems just appropriate what is already present in human society (morality, ethics, collective memory, etc) and claim to be the originator and sustainer of these things. I do not see them as actually adding anything that inherently could only be done in that way.
Religion is the “real deal.” It affects a person’s emotions and a their perception of reality, and it can be addictive and destroy lives, much like a drug.
If religion wasn’t the “real deal,” it wouldn’t be so popular.
Up until I was in college, I was always questioning religion and thinking about religious topics. When I was in 8th grade on a field trip for our school's intellectually gifted students, one of the other students and myself talked about religion the entire trip. He was a believer, and I was not.
I had an interest in black metal and other forms of "devil music," and still do. I was the quintessential guy listening to metal and wearing black in the immediate post-Columbine era. I was bullied as a kid, and grew up in Tennessee in an area dominated by Southern Baptists. I hated religion.
Over the years, I became at least more open to the concept of a higher power. One of my high school teachers was a minister, and we discussed religion for years. I went to his church for several years after high school. I was also very interested in religion in college, never really religious, but took many academic classes regarding religion.
Over time, I guess I've just become disinterested in it all. I haven't attended church in years. Really don't care about religion one way or another, aside from a vague belief in a higher power.
Does anyone else find themselves in a similar position?
I have. I have always been interested in religion, but not religious. I have alway been interested also in philosophy and literature. I read a lot growing up as our house was always filled with books. While I stopped praying, i never lost interest. Within the last few years I taught myself Sanskrit in order to understand Vedanta (Hinduism philosophy) without the intermediary translations in English i found these frustrating and inadequate. The more I know and understand I find my spirituality and worship deepens. I find profound peace and happiness in my religion now.
I think it is a matter of sustained interest, study, knowledge, and ultimately being drawn to it again and again.
I would be distressed to think that order, logic, reason, science and the like was something foreign to the female of the species.
That is a common mistake to think in terms of male and female species. There are qualities are not gender based, they are just divided into two kinds, masculine and feminine. Women can possess masculine qualities like valor and endurance and men can posses feminine qualities such as empathy and compassion. Both are important to have.
Logic, reason are a function of our faculties. All people have them and they exercise them in individual capacities.
04-20-2023, 06:47 PM
cb2008
Atheists have all the answers.
I just noticed this little snarky tidbit under your moniker.....I had no idea! I guess I'm smarter than I thought since I have all the answers.
Really cb? You have got a serious problem with hatred of and an obsession with atheists. I'm embarrassed for you, it's really sad. No one can change your mean disposition except you. Hmm, your thread got closed. Wonder why.
All I know is if the OP still listens to Black Metal or Death Metal or any of those other kinds of Metal music...
I hope they are using earphones by now.
Seriously. I don't think the OP has participated in this forum since 2018. This is the problem with resurrecting old threads. I wonder who did that?
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