Experiencing a crisis of faith.
Even as I write this I am hesitant to make this post. However, it has been on my mind for a few years now. Religion is such a volatile subject and I hope this won't stir up a hornets nest but rather this will be a calm, respectful discussion. My family was Presbyterian. I was brought up going to Sunday school from the start. When I was around 10 yr old I asked that instead of Sunday school, could I go with mom to "the big room" with her. Even then I was looking for answers. The deal in my family was you had to go to church through the 8th grade but after that it was your choice to continuing going or not. I was not satisfied with what I was hearing so I stopped. When I was in college I took several religion classes as electives; History of Religion, World Religions, etc. Though not entirely sure what I was looking for, I knew I still hadnt found any answers. I developed my own religion of sorts - prayed daily, tried to be a good person - even wore a cross around my neck - not particularly in reference of Jesus but more of a daily commitment to be a giving, kind, generous person. I even went a couple of years watching "church on TV" - that's how I viewed it. I became a big fan of Joyce Meyer - who I still think is awesome. I would say as far as religion goes I am maybe a tiny bit more knowledge than your average American. Then in 2008 my dad got sick - never really made a complete recovery and began his descent into a steady decline - his CHF which began pretty passively really started to get a hold on him. Dads last 1 1/2 years were pretty awful for him physically although his mind was still good up until his final few weeks. I adored my father. While my childhood was pretty awful largely due to my mother - and my parents dysfunction relationship with each other - once I hit my 20's I was able to get past it in regards to my dad. My father was my best friend for the last 30 years of his life. We talked on the phone daily and were as close as any father/daughter can be. My father was always there for me - as well as my disabled son (who is named after his grandpa) he was there for my mother and my brothers too - although neither brother could get past our childhood and was never close to daddy. As far as I'm concerned this was my brothers loss and they never saw my dad for the amazing man he was. This hurt my father - he had tried for so long to make it up to my brothers - for the crappy childhood - and my heart broke for my dad. In the last month I prayed for God to take my father - i couldn't stand to see him suffering and I knew that it was what my father wanted - to end his suffering, to end being the weak helpless person he had become / he hated it. When my dad passed he was in a strange place and alone - it's a long story but in short my mother had him taken to a hospice center behind my back - on the one day in over two months that I couldn't go over to spend the day with him - I will never forgive her for this. My father vehemently did not want to go anywhere like that - he wanted to be at home and I had hired help for 18 hours a day and was in the process of making it 24 hours a day when mom had him moved. Mom did none of the care taking of dad. Okay - so my crisis of faith: why does it have to be like it is for so many of our loved ones as they age? It's painful both mentally and physically. They are robbed of their dignity, their independence, their minds, on and on in the most degrading ways possible. Where is Gods loving mercy? What is it we are meant to learn that has to be taught in the most heinous way possible? While I didn't really expect daddy to contact me from the other side I guess I did expect to feel his presence in some way - as close as we were. There is a thread going now - it's quite beautiful really - of story after story of long passed friends and relatives appearing to gently and lovingly help our loved ones "go home". Some even think Jesus himself is showing up. I'm not meaning to discount thoses stories - but could it be people are telling themselves this is what happens as a way of comforting themselves and their passing loved ones? This whole bit of being reunited - doesn't it make it easier on everyone to believe it's true? But what if when your dead - your just dead, gone? I just feel my dad is gone - forever gone. I've heard it said that faith is believing in something when there is no proof. I feel like I have lost faith. The whole "God works in mysterious ways. God has a plan" just doesn't do it for me any longer. What plan could possibly mean a good man - a man who took care of everyone in his life had to suffer in the most painful and degrading ways imaginable? I guess some of the Sunday school fire and brimstone lessons have stuck - I practically find myself looking over my shoulder for a lightening bolt as I write this. But beyond that?
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The other question, of why suffering is visited on good people to no clear purpose, is one for the ages. I remember stumbling over something along the lines of: "without your consent you are born and without your consent you live and without your consent you die" [so take what you're given and stop complaining, was the gist] - probably Chasidic, it usually is when it's that brusque.
Rainmom, like you I had a bit of a liquorice all-sorts religious education and took it terribly, terribly seriously when I was a wee tot. In fact the other day a "friend" emailed me a copy of a poem I wrote on the subject that got inexplicably published in the school magazine in 1975 - excruciating, I wish I could track down all copies and burn them immediately - but I digress. Did you not find, in your religious travels, that most if not all traditions have their central tenets in common? So that none of them has the answer, but then again in other ways they all do and you can't go far wrong whichever you follow?
To give an example of what I'm getting at, take mindfulness. Very useful habit to develop, lots of medical evidence of how good it is for calming down your brain hormones and helping you get your priorities straight. But as I was trawling the internet for a guide book to practical mindfulness (and tee-heeing over some of the extremely funny satires you bump into while you're at it), and rejecting them one after the other on the grounds of bad grammar or bonkersness or extortion, it occurred to me that the many, many hours I spent long ago sitting, standing or kneeling in a variety of religious settings - well, varied except for the extreme cold, that is - were in themselves devoted to exactly the same purpose. And since I am already familiar with C of E liturgy, I might as well stick to it. Unfortunately Sister Eleanor with her gleaming Goebbels glasses is no longer around to chivvy me down to the chapel so my new year's resolution is not going so well - I say resolution. More tinkering with an idea - that re-establishing a pattern to the week and including in it regular attendance at a service would do me good and concentrate my mind.
I don't think answers, or Answers, are what religion is for; and especially not Christianity, with the celebration of mystery at its heart. But look at all the goodies you do get! You get an ethical and philosophical framework. You get a perspective on the world and how you ought, as best you can, to deal with it. You get the condensed experience, and often wisdom, of countless preceding generations. If you're the clubbable type, you get a community to be part of. You get a 24/7 helpline - and even if you don't feel you get any feedback from prayer, prayer does at least help you organise your hopes and cares. I wouldn't throw out those babies with the bathwater.
I also wouldn't worry about getting struck by lightning. I work on the assumption that, as with the prodigal son, God would be delighted to welcome your faith; but quite honestly, if you're not ready, if you never will be ready, if you flatly refuse to countenance the existence of any such thing even, it's no skin off His nose (I don't expect he puts it quite like that). Certainly not to the extent of bothering to smite you, anyway.
I wonder if maybe what we lose when something terrible happens, or whole series of terrible things for that matter, is not so much faith as trust. We trust in a loving God who orders the universe, and when that universe seems to us to be going very badly and painfully we would like an explanation. But tough, we're not getting one.
So no, you don't get many "why?" answers, I agree. Just a thought: it's possible we wouldn't understand the answer even if we knew what it was.
"The cheese mites asked how the cheese got there,
And warmly debated the matter.
The orthodox said it came from the air
And the heretics said from the platter."
Years of Parochial School raised Catholic in Boston has put much doubt in my religous beliefs...
Jessie, very realistic and compassionate assessment in your first post, and well balanced scientific vs. acceptance on faith analysis in your second post, although I do recall reading sometime ago about scientists who do accept that there is a god. And the null hypothesis? Wow! You're helping me remember things I'd forgotten about.
I've learned from the bible stories that to believe in God and to have faith in him is not an easy road to travel (hence go thru the narrow road and not the wide road). You see in the examples of Noah, Lot and his wife, Jonah (who didn't want to preach God's words to those scary people and so he fled - and got swallowed by a fish - most likely a whale..) Paul and Jesus suffered. Hence, in my conclusion, I believe in God but I choose not to follow the narrow road. I will continue to plug on in life and when I die, Please Do NOT resurrect me! I don't want to go to heaven or earth or anywhere. When I die, leave me be.
In all my readings of the Bible, the only time God killed people - it was by mass killing - like the Flood, Lot's city which was filled with really bad sinners (even young boys tried to rape the angels who went in looking for people worthy of saving due to Lot's requests...) It's called Judgment. I'm a little sketchy on the stories because it's based on my memory of that time when I was deeply into the bible (in my mid-20's).
So, when my sister's boyfriend shot the gun and accidentally killed their baby who was going to 'drop' in her stomach to be born, I was very angry when the priest said in the funeral mass that it was God's Will that He took the baby.... God did Not take that baby. His father killed him. Not God. I'm 100% positive that my sister's baby will be resurrected when the allotted time arrives. When people say that my mom might be resurrected, inside, I cringe. I don't know. Because I don't know if God will think she's worthy of a 2nd chance despite the way she raised us kids. I don't know, I don't care...as long as I die, and I stay dead. This life sucked since I was in kindergarten (furthest memory of my deep fear of staying home from school. I'd rather be in school where I was bullied, than to stay home...) I have no desire to live forever, not even if it's in heaven. Just let it be done. Period.
In order to test something, you have to step outside of it and formulate a hypothesis of some sort. We could do something very simple like hypothesize that god is responsible for an ant moving (or the null hypothesis that god is not responsible). We could show all the chemistry and mechanics that support that god is not needed for the ant to be moving. BUT we are inside the system and cannot say that god was not the master chemist and physicist that put it all together at the start.
Science and faith don't mix, so aren't considered together. Any scientist will simply say that "God isn't real" is not a testable hypothesis. Some scientists believe in god; others don't. Scientific "evidence" that there is no god is no more valid than religious "evidence" that there is.
I must add some comments about the word "proof" and then I'll be quite.
The phrase "scientifically proven" is a great marketing tool. However, science does not prove anything absolutely.
Why? There is always the possibility of finding new information. The new information may support a theory. The new information may contradict the theory.
For example, we might think that a certain medicine has been proven to work. However, over time, they may find that it has unexpected side effects that are worse than the benefits of the medicine. Another example from medicine is sometimes a medicine is found to help people with other problems than the one the medicine was initially made for. For example, Viagra was initially made for the heart, but then other uses were found which most people know it by today. Another medical example is Latuda which is an antipsychotic was recently approved for helping those suffering from bipolar depression like me.
Because new information might be found to support or contradict a medical product or something, a good scientist will say something along the lines of "the evidence supports the theory that ..." They will never say "my theory is proven."
We would like absolute certainty. However, we have to be content with how much confidence we have in the evidence. In other words, what is the probability this is true based on what we have found.
For example, some biblical scholars thought that there must have been two Isaiahs who wrote the book of Isaiah. When pushed to say why, their answer shows a prior assumption that Isaiah prophecy about what would happen to Israel could not have taken place. Their prior assumption, not any evidence is why they saw it this way. A prior assumption is also known as a presupposition.
Years later, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls showed that Isaiah was one whole book. This ancient copy of Isaiah led people to have more confidence that the original Isaiah was one whole book with one author.
People sometimes question how reliable is our current copy of the New Testament. Over the years more and more copies of the NT or parts of the NT have been found and darted. The result is that we have more evidence that supports, not proves how reliable our current copy of the NT is.
We have more copies of the NT or parts that are nearer to when they were written than other ancient writings. This does not prove anything. However, it does suggest a high probability or likelihood.
It is far too easy to skip observing, questioning, and interpreting the evidence for and against. When someone does that, they just jump right into their own self-selective conclusions with selective "proofs" or evidence. We see this when people use the Bible as a collection of proof texts for their own purpose.
Otherwise, one is left with easily believing something or easily not believing something without the hard work of thinking either through.
About wars and sickness -- they are going to happen. Deer fight. Squirrels fight. Fish eat each other. Chimps will wipe out another group of chimps. Humans may hold up holy books and wage holy war, but it's really just trying to gain dominance. Sickness it pretty much the same. Everything gets sick and dies. Humans have found ways to make life longer, but at the same time have made sickness longer. This is quite understandable, since people generally died before they were 80 and now often live well into their 90s. Those last years often carry the burden of poor health. So they are a blessing on one hand and a curse on the other.
One thing I love to see is the effort of some philanthropists to ease suffering in the world. I like it best when they don't make the help contingent on believing in a certain religion. This kind of help is saying that it is there because the individuals are special and worthy, and not to promote an agenda. The world is a sad place at times. Sometimes people are killed or not helped because they're not the "right" religion.
Indeed! At 52 years old the only death I have ever known was the death of my parent's. Both died while I held them. Yes. Death is indeed an enemy and my faith is hanging by small withering threads.
Often I see elderly that appear to be not so nice and I wonder why God took the only people that I loved. Why did this happen? They were great people and not so great people continue to thrive.
Are you speaking of my most recent post or all of the above?
The phrase "scientifically proven" is a great marketing tool, but science does not prove anything absolutely. A good scientist will say something along the lines of "the evidence supports the theory that ..." but will never say "my theory is proven, look at this data."
While truth is the absolute goal, we can always gather or discover more data which means that perfect certainty cannot be known. Thus, scientists often use statistics to measure the confidence level that the data gives in support for their theory.
This leaves one with a confidence or probability level for explaining something based on the ranking of the evidence which either adds or subtracts from the probability of something being correct. Not all evidence is of equal probability rank just like in a court of law.
Everyone has presuppositions and those will automatically preclude some evidence while including other evidence. Therefore, a person's presuppositions will shape their reasoning about the evidence which means that complete, impartial, objective reasoning is not totally possible. Anyway, we humans are not as rational in how we live as much as we would like to think that we are.
So, looking at the basis of one's knowledge claim and one's presuppositions behind those claims must be thought through by means of critical thinking.
Otherwise, one is left with easily believing something or easily not believing something without the hard work of thinking either through.
It is far too easy to skip inductive thinking with its focus on observation, questioning, and interpreting and jump right into deductive thinking with selective "proofs", upon which conclusions and applications are made.
Barnacles are like the tragedies of life.
On a wooden ship they destroy its life.
Those who run into barnacles are diced.
Barnacles can shipwreck your or another’s life.
Ever hear that hurt people, hurt people too?
How can this not be true of me and you?
If we refuse to feel the pain and anger of being diced.
We end up numb and dumb just like ice.
To forever nurse the pain,
Leads to never being free to love again.
We cannot chose to be or not to be hurt by the barnacle like tragedies and people in life.
However, we can chose not to let them make us like a barnacle in another’s life.
To be or not to be a barnacle is the question for tonight.
To feel hurt and anger, but sin not is a difficult fight.
However, it is the biblical way to a better day.
Yet holding on to it and nursing it digs a dark and dreary day.
People, we do this as if it will somehow accomplish something.
But in all honesty, that choice accomplishes nothing.
I often run into 2 extreme views about suffering. .
1. One is that everything good and bad that takes place in our lives was predestined to take place anyway.
In this outlook, God becomes responsible for making everything predestined in our lives and we nor anyone else has any responsibility for anything that takes place. One of the most common expressions that I've heard of this outlook is when someone tries to comfort a grieving parent by telling them that God needed another angel in heaven which makes God the heavy for the child's death.
2. The other is that since we have free will, that we are totally in control of everything that takes place in our lives and if it does not take place, it is entirely our fault and ours alone. In this outlook,
In this outlook, God becomes viewed as either irrelevant or the means by which we gain and/or accomplish everything we want. This is practical atheism and a utilitarian view of God by others. While some live like God does not exist, that does not mean God has ceased existing or that people do not need God in their lives.
While some live like they think they can control God to make them prosperous and successful, that does not mean that God is a gene in a bottle or a teller two machine that we just have to plug into with the right formula. I hear this often when someone is told that they are not healed from their depression because they don't have enough faith or that they are not prosperous because they did not claim certain scripture passages to make them prosperous as if those verses were the access code for getting into the teller two machine. Trying to manipulate God to get what we want is not faith, it's magic and magic is not biblical. An attempt to relate to God magically leads ultimately to a person acting as if God died and left them in control which is not true.
Unlike the rest of the people around them, magic was looked down upon for Israel. Also, contrary the religious culture of the ancient near east and elsewhere where idols were worshiped because of a belief that they controlled the weather, crops, fertility, etc, Israel was commanded to not make any idols and when they did, they got in big trouble. Idol worship is also a form of magic. People who live with a magical view of God are worshiping an idol of how they have shaped God to be in their mind. We don't find a magical approach to God in the Old Testament or the New Testament as being on target.
For me, faith in God is a relationship of trust which recognizes God as God and does not try to reshape God like we want God to be or by making the world the end and faith the means. It is a relationship in which we realize that God is our creator and that we live in a world like it is because of the risky business of free will which God gave Adam and Eve which they messed up by sinning against God.
So, neither absolute determinism nor absolute free will really fit with either the Bible or today's world of good and evil which is only more technologically advanced, but human nature remains the same.
This is where I'm coming from.
As for me, I realize through my experiences that I've been given more than enough reason to believe...there is scripture and the Mass which is always the Mass even when the music is bad or the sermon boring. My son and I recently reread Job together...has not quite convinced him to come back to the faith, but I see goodness in him and pray every day. The abuses of religion are a major reason people leave the faith, because one would suppose that given the truth and the desire to to good, all religious people would, but, well, one would seem to be wrong. Churches are more like hospitals for sinners than museums for saints as the saying goes. And in my Church, its a special jubilee Year of Mercy...Lord knows we need it!!
I think one of the hard answers to suffering is this: to make the world free of suffering, God would have to control us to the point of having no life or will of our own, like Camazotz in the old Madeleine L'Engle story, and that would be a greater evil from His point of view. So, He did what He did instead, and part of Christianity's answer is that He then chose to share our suffering with us, promising to be with us in it and a way to triumph over it all in the end.
Can you imagine what life would be like if we didn't have free will. We would be like robots. Yeah, there would be no starving, genocide, war etc. but if we were all the same, what would be the point. I believe and I know that if I didn't have my faith, life would of been even harder than it has been.
But, its the age old argument. Plus there are fanatics in every walk of life. People who take a simple idea and turn it into a cause. There are many christians out there who don't jump on you with their thoughts and try to ram them down their throats. I don't go around preaching to people. If someone asks I'll tell them.
Even within Christianity there is a spectrum of fundamentalist, evangelical, moderate, modernist, and extreme liberal.
There are also books that make an intelligent case for Christianity itself and those which do so in contrast to other religions.
The biggest challenge to belief is the problem of suffering in the world.
Personally, I don't think that God has an exact, predetermined map or plan for each individual person. That removes free will and removes any responsibility for one's choices. No where in the Bible does it say that God will not allow suffering to come into out lives that is more than we can bear. Some follow the suggestion of Job's wife to curse God and die. However, others chose to not curse God and give up even with the suffering not making any sense like Job did.
I also get very tired of those who try to explain some lesson that someone is supposed to learn from suffering for there is not always an explanation for the suffering. My second cousin died from a bullet fired by a policeman at a criminal that missed him and traveled as a stray bullet which killed my second cousin who was delivering the mail in a troubled neighborhood. Who is at fault? Why did this happen? There aren't any clear answers. I put puzzles like this in God's hands who is much greater than me.
From my perspective, life is risky, painful, often chaotic and sometimes one breath away from catastrophe or death itself. Often what takes place in my life and in the lives of others can be because of something I did or did not do or because of my human limitations or moral condition. Or things can take place in my life or others because of what others do or don't do depending on their human limitations or moral condition. However, that still does not answer for all suffering. We live in a fallen world in which the last enemy is death.
Personally, I believe that there is no suffering so dark or problematic catastrophic hole that God's love and presence is not deeper yet despite regardless if we feel his presence or not. There were many times in Mother Teresa's life that she did not feel God but she kept believing. No where in the Bible is faith defined as a feeling, but as trust. To live by feelings is very shaky ground for me.
But how does one reconcile the beliefs of Mormons with Baptists for example. Both groups have starkly different views of heaven and hell and what gets you to either place. Both groups have absolute faith (there's that term again) that their beliefs are correct and spend time praying for the souls of those who don't share their views. I'm not picking on these two groups, we could list hundreds of popular religions and the sects within many, but it's just mind boggling when you consider all the vastly conflicting "faith based" doctrines that are totally incompatible with each other, let alone any rational thought.
As a kid I was taught that only those that attended my church and believed as we did would get into heaven. All the rest would perish in everlasting hells fire and brimstone. It seemed to me that heaven was going to have lots of elbow room.
Having had many experiences in my life, I do believe in the spirit world but I can't condone religion in any shape or form when so many wars and killings have been done under its guise. I defend anyone's right to believe in what they wish but when they push it in other people's faces it's a deal breaker.
I have a crazy bible thumping woman across the road ... unfortunately the only house for a mile. When I first lived here, almost 3 years ago, she was all over me quoting scriptures, trying to take my life over and dictate how I should live and what I should do with my property. One summer afternoon, as she jumped up and down screaming about satan, I snapped and threw her off the front lawn. She hasn't come near me since except for some blistering, accusatory, threatening emails containing scriptures and comments proving that she spies on me with binoculars.
She hides in her house with some 40 unfixed, unshotted cats, doesn't work and doesn't drive. Hubby, a harmless sad little man, takes her shopping for groceries and umpteen cases of beer on Saturday morning. There is never a visitor. I don't watch them but my little dog parks herself in the front window and screams at anything that moves and, with incidences of rabies in the area lately ... I had a sick racoon come after me recently ... I check out what she's screaming at.
I've saved her emails in case I have to ever get a restraining order but, since she discovered my career was in the legal profession, she'll be too scared to come near me. I find it sad and feel sorry for them both.
I saw something recently that sums it up ... "Religion is like a p*n*s. I'm happy for you to have it, love on it and worship it but whip it out and wave it in my face and we have a problem".. Sorry folks, but that's just my feeling. You can murder someone on Saturday and trot off to church on Sunday ... excuse me?