@Christians: which questions shake your faith?

[Stark]

Just to take this thread a bit off topic but really Covenant you've never come across the need to be socially conformitive amonst your mates/work mates? In my experience it's pretty universal everyone does it when they are around their mates/ workmates. Then again it may just be an Aussie thing.

It's a -cowardly- thing. I don't change my expressed beliefs or attitudes to suit others, particularly not whent others hold ethically-dubious or ignorant ideas.

[Samuel]

Just to take this thread a bit off topic but really Covenant you've never come across the need to be socially conformitive amonst your mates/work mates? In my experience it's pretty universal everyone does it when they are around their mates/ workmates. Then again it may just be an Aussie thing.

It's a -cowardly- thing. I don't change my expressed beliefs or attitudes to suit others, particularly not whent others hold ethically-dubious or ignorant ideas.

The technical term is conformity and it is universal. Most people tend to change to match the group if they are the only outlier. Most people also think they are more independent minded than they are, but I think Stark's assessment of himself is accurate. Don't ever change.

[CaptainChewbacca]

The biggest blow to my faith is stupid Christians, who go off ranting about 'teh evul gayz!' or how they can have serious conversations about how glad they are they aren't vaccinating their kids. I'm pretty sure if the people at my church found out I'd voted to support gay marriage in california, I'd be in for a lot of icy glares.

My big issue is that Jesus taught a LOT about love and acceptance, but I still hear 15-year-olds in my youth group saying 'Yeah, but I really hate dykes' when in a discussion about homosexuality.

[Junghalli]

How many Christians are willing to admit to themselves that if they had grown up in a different culture, they'd believe something completely different? Are most Christians sufficiently self-aware to realize that those little catch phrases they find so compelling (like "Jesus died for your sins") do not have the same effect on (for example) a Buddhist? Or do they honestly believe that they can just say those words and a lifelong Buddhist would suddenly say "Oh my, I see the light now, what you're saying makes so much sense! I can't believe no one ever told me about this before!"

I know the really hardline fundies believe that, but they're imbeciles. I just wonder how many "normal" Christians understand how culturally dependent their beliefs (and their opinions of the credibility of those beliefs) are.

I don't know about Christians in general, but even in my teenage fundie stage I wasn't stupid enough to believe I'd instantly convert on hearing some Bible passages if I'd been raised in a whole different religious tradition.

[General Zod]

The technical term is conformity and it is universal. Most people tend to change to match the group if they are the only outlier. Most people also think they are more independent minded than they are, but I think Stark's assessment of himself is accurate. Don't ever change.

Turns out frequency has nothing to do with whether something is desirable or even acceptable? Who knew!

[Stark]

The technical term is conformity and it is universal. Most people tend to change to match the group if they are the only outlier. Most people also think they are more independent minded than they are, but I think Stark's assessment of himself is accurate. Don't ever change.

I think there's a big difference between being silent and actually changing your ideas to suit those of people around you. Being silent is still 'conformity' and peer pressure but it's less ridiculous than simply mindlessly adopting the ideas or beliefs of those around you (probably the loudest of those around you too). How anyone who is able to think critically can do this is somewhat beyond me.

[Darth Wong]

I think there's a big difference between being silent and actually changing your ideas to suit those of people around you. Being silent is still 'conformity' and peer pressure but it's less ridiculous than simply mindlessly adopting the ideas or beliefs of those around you (probably the loudest of those around you too). How anyone who is able to think critically can do this is somewhat beyond me.

The thing is, while it is pretty stupid to blindly accept everything you're told, a person's intuitive sense of what is "reasonable" is heavily influenced by his surroundings. If almost everyone around you believes something, you're more likely to think it's reasonable, even if you don't share the belief. That's why people can laugh out loud at certain beliefs they perceive to be "ridiculous" (see Scientology) while thinking it's rude and offensive to similarly mock the mainstream religion of their particular culture.

How many people in America bristle if someone openly mocks and insults Christian beliefs, even if they do not consider themselves believers? How many of them would laugh if someone did the same to Scientology? That's peer pressure at work.

[spaceviking]

I wouldn't consider myself to be a traditional Christian, but I remember when I was younger I found the exclusiveness between the denomination to be the most disconcerning. I had baptist, Anglican, Catholic etc friends who believed only their denomination went to heaven, but no one had any real reason why their particular denomination was better then the others.

[Covenant]

Just to take this thread a bit off topic but really Covenant you've never come across the need to be socially conformitive amonst your mates/work mates? In my experience it's pretty universal everyone does it when they are around their mates/ workmates. Then again it may just be an Aussie thing.

I was suprised to get a direct response. You gotta' be careful with your words though, since there's a big difference towards conforming and just not making an issue out of stuff. Have I ever felt or seen a need to conform? Of course not, there's no need to ever conform, so long as you don't feel the need to be a jackass in a professional environment. I'm working for a sports broadcasting group and I don't even watch any sports. Moreover, I certainly wouldn't conform to be around my mates. You don't need to agree on everything, afterall. Lying about yourself to intergrate yourself to a group may or may not be an effective way of keeping social, but it's not required, and it shouldn't be done with friends.

Also, if you're at work or with co-workers, be professional. You're not there to make a political statement, you're there to do a job. If the people there don't share political and religious views with you, then don't try to be part of their political and religious discussions. Really, these topics are controversial and opening up the office to aggrivation, legal action and loss of valuable work-time, so should be stamped out anyway. I see nothing wrong in abstaining from these kinds of conversations in an environment that shouldn't contain them anyway.

I suppose the difference is, my politics, religious ideas, and favorite sports teams don't defiine who I am as a person, so they're not things I feel the need to proactively defend against people who don't really care what I think anyway. There's a difference between maintaining professional conduct and personal lives seperate, and lying about your personal life. If someone at work asks me casually about my religion, I can quite honestly tell them it's private and that's a very fair and reasonable response. There's no justifiable reason for them to press you further, and it was probably wrong for them to ask you anyway. Now, let's say that this person and I got into a relationship and after the second date she asks me again, this would be the appropriate time to speak up about yourself regardless of what could happen.

If someone asks me, I'll tell them what I think, but do it in a way that doesn't negatively impact the work conditions. I've wrestled with bosses over things related to the job before, and that's legitimate, since it has to do with the job. I suppose someone could consider it a weasel-concept, but I don't. There are appropriate places for debate and inappropriate ones. Even friendships shouldn't dwell too much on politics and religion, since the question really remains... why? Even people who agree 99 percent of the time on issues can make mountains out of molehills on such issues unless the individuals are mature enough to discuss them philosophically and not personally (my friends do, and if yours do too, then this can be fun and similar to the Wolf-and-Sheepdog thing where nobody stays angry).

[Darth Paxis]

I'm curious - why haven't you questioned your faith in God? Do you have any doubts at all? If you don't, why don't you? Are you incurious or used to blind belief

I haven't questioned my faith in God because I've always felt like there's something bigger than me out there. I've never felt any reason to doubt His existence, so I haven't. I've been raised in Christianity, so I suppose it's possible that its blind belief, but isn't that what faith really is.

[nightmare]

I´ve never had any religious faith, christian or otherwise. I´ve studied many forms of religions including their history like I would any subject and read the whole of the bible (damn boring most of it), and the qur´an. I don´t have the time nor inclination anymore to study such less directly useful things.

For many years, I was a member of the church through inaction, but that´s past now too. The only reason I kept it during later years was if my wife would want a church wedding - at least one of us would have to be a member for that. She´s technically a buddhist.

[Ender]

I may not qualify here, but the big question that started me down the path away from the faith was what I've called "the Judas question"

Judas betrayed Christ, marking him as an evil man and sending him to hell. Yet Judas was acting as part of God's plan when he did so - if he had not turned Christ over to the Romans the sacrifice could not have been made and we not have been given salvation. Judas Iscariot was only second to Jesus himself when it comes to redeeming mankind. And for this he is probably the most hated man in history. I could never reconcile this - if carrying out God's will is good, then why was Judas damned? I asked my teachers and priests, closest thing I ever got to an answer was that Judas would have avoided hell if he had sought forgiveness before his death, but that still doesn't explain why he would be going to hell in the first place.

[Patrick Degan]

I may not qualify here, but the big question that started me down the path away from the faith was what I've called "the Judas question"

Judas betrayed Christ, marking him as an evil man and sending him to hell. Yet Judas was acting as part of God's plan when he did so - if he had not turned Christ over to the Romans the sacrifice could not have been made and we not have been given salvation. Judas Iscariot was only second to Jesus himself when it comes to redeeming mankind. And for this he is probably the most hated man in history. I could never reconcile this - if carrying out God's will is good, then why was Judas damned? I asked my teachers and priests, closest thing I ever got to an answer was that Judas would have avoided hell if he had sought forgiveness before his death, but that still doesn't explain why he would be going to hell in the first place.

As an aside, the M*A*S*H episode "Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler" slipped that disturbing question in on the viewers, in the course of a conversation between Father Mulcahey and the titular character, who came in with a head wound and the delusion that he was Jesus Christ. Their exchange was never resolved and left that very point hanging in midair.

There's that issue as well as the implications of the Old Testament story of Job, who's life was wrecked essentially as part of a bet between God and Satan, which were among the kernels of doubt which began increasingly to pile up when I was reaching for a reason to continue in my own faith or faith of any sort.

[Surlethe]

I'm curious - why haven't you questioned your faith in God? Do you have any doubts at all? If you don't, why don't you? Are you incurious or used to blind belief

I haven't questioned my faith in God because I've always felt like there's something bigger than me out there. I've never felt any reason to doubt His existence, so I haven't. I've been raised in Christianity, so I suppose it's possible that its blind belief, but isn't that what faith really is.

That's what I told myself, but then I asked myself why that worked. After all, when I say "God exists", I'm making a statement about the world outside of me. If faith is blind belief, then how is it a valid path to knowledge of things outside myself? I've also had similar thoughts about how I feel like there's something bigger than me, but then I wonder how my intuitive feelings are a valid path to knowledge - I've encountered enough counterintuitive things in my mathematical and physical training that I simply don't trust my intuition anymore.

Do you have any resolutions to these questions that let me keep my faith in God? If you do, I really would like to know.

[Darth Paxis]

I think that faith isn't knowledge. Sure, I can say that I know God exists, but I can't provide hard proof other than my personal feelings. Faith isn't used to gain knowledge of the world as much as yourself. It seems to me that your faith has opened deep personal questions for you that I can't answer. All I can do is say that I think that faith and knowledge are not nessicarily intertwined and that they can be kept separate.

I'm sorry if this doesn't help you.

[Patrick Degan]

I'm curious - why haven't you questioned your faith in God? Do you have any doubts at all? If you don't, why don't you? Are you incurious or used to blind belief

I haven't questioned my faith in God because I've always felt like there's something bigger than me out there. I've never felt any reason to doubt His existence, so I haven't. I've been raised in Christianity, so I suppose it's possible that its blind belief, but isn't that what faith really is.

That's what I told myself, but then I asked myself why that worked. After all, when I say "God exists", I'm making a statement about the world outside of me. If faith is blind belief, then how is it a valid path to knowledge of things outside myself? I've also had similar thoughts about how I feel like there's something bigger than me, but then I wonder how my intuitive feelings are a valid path to knowledge - I've encountered enough counterintuitive things in my mathematical and physical training that I simply don't trust my intuition anymore.

Do you have any resolutions to these questions that let me keep my faith in God? If you do, I really would like to know.

Not really. The whole problem boils down to the fact that the proposition "God" is not testable, therefore not falsifiable. There are no parametres by which to establish such tests and the "testimony" of the being's existence is entirely anecdotal and filtered through a book which is at the least 1700 years old at last major edit, and based on entirely untestable assertions and/or tales which have been handed down through n-generations before being committed to any form of print, which in turn has been edited, altered and to some degree inevitably riddled with errors in interpretation.

Logically the question is moot because, even if such a being did exist as creator-of-all, given the scope of the universe there is no remotely sensible reason why such a being would necessarily even notice us and that therefore a universe with a god is no different operationally than a universe without one, as far as we are concerned. This leads inevitably to the question as to whether a creator-god is even necessary as a cause for the universe or that there was even a first cause at all.

[Surlethe]

I think that faith isn't knowledge. Sure, I can say that I know God exists, but I can't provide hard proof other than my personal feelings.

That's just the thing for me. Feelings are absolutely worthless when it comes to gaining knowledge, and if faith is an article of feelings, why should it be a window into truth? My emotional state has no bearing on the way the world actually is, whether I like it or not.

Faith isn't used to gain knowledge of the world as much as yourself. It seems to me that your faith has opened deep personal questions for you that I can't answer. All I can do is say that I think that faith and knowledge are not nessicarily intertwined and that they can be kept separate.

That's where I get hung up: as a proposition with some truth value in principle, God's existence belongs in the domain of knowledge. Faith, on the other hand, is the act of trusting, but trust has to be based on knowledge.

I'm sorry if this doesn't help you.

You're fine. Thanks for your opinion.

[Surlethe]

That's what I told myself, but then I asked myself why that worked. After all, when I say "God exists", I'm making a statement about the world outside of me. If faith is blind belief, then how is it a valid path to knowledge of things outside myself? I've also had similar thoughts about how I feel like there's something bigger than me, but then I wonder how my intuitive feelings are a valid path to knowledge - I've encountered enough counterintuitive things in my mathematical and physical training that I simply don't trust my intuition anymore.

Do you have any resolutions to these questions that let me keep my faith in God? If you do, I really would like to know.

Not really. The whole problem boils down to the fact that the proposition "God" is not testable, therefore not falsifiable. There are no parametres by which to establish such tests and the "testimony" of the being's existence is entirely anecdotal and filtered through a book which is at the least 1700 years old at last major edit, and based on entirely untestable assertions and/or tales which have been handed down through n-generations before being committed to any form of print, which in turn has been edited, altered and to some degree inevitably riddled with errors in interpretation.

I'm aware of these problems - my questions above are more concerned with epistemology than with the nature of the proposition "God exists". Whether it can be resolved in the scientific system depends on how precisely "God" is defined, and to my knowledge all well-defined notions of God have been disproved, leaving only the various imprecisely defined notions of God. Those, as you point out, are not testable. But all of this being resolved scientifically requires that I accept only the scientific method as an adequate way of knowing - hence, my questions above: why are these various other alleged paths to knowledge actually valid?

Logically the question is moot because, even if such a being did exist as creator-of-all, given the scope of the universe there is no remotely sensible reason why such a being would necessarily even notice us and that therefore a universe with a god is no different operationally than a universe without one, as far as we are concerned. This leads inevitably to the question as to whether a creator-god is even necessary as a cause for the universe or that there was even a first cause at all.

I'm going to disagree with you here on the second point. If such a creature as a God existed, there's no particular reason why it wouldn't be able to focus on us. It's an anthropomorphizing leap to say that God wouldn't focus on us because we wouldn't focus on a dust mote, and useful when reducing an anthropomorphized God ad absurdum, but in general it is not a valid deduction. The third point - whether a first cause existed - is an entirely different question, and one that has a useful geometric resolution IMHO.

[Civil War Man]

At the risk of moving this thread even more towards "what made me a non-believer" as opposed to "what shakes your faith", I shall weigh in on what started me down this path.

So it was some time around the end of the eighties/beginning of the nineties. I'm around 6-8 years old. I'm a pretty typical kid. Big into dinosaurs for as long as I'd been able to think. We're talking really big. One family story has an uncle seeing me playing with a toy dinosaur and calling it a Brontosaurus, at which point I look at him as if he were a complete idiot and inform him that it was in fact a Diplodocus. I suppose I should have been easier on him, since he was at least in the right Family.

Anyway, officially, I was Catholic on account of my father (my mother, a lapsed Catholic at most, told him that if he wanted their kids raised Catholic, he'd be responsible for providing the Catholic part). Being a little kid, church bored me out of my mind, but I had no reason to start thinking that the stuff I wasn't paying attention to wasn't true.

Then came one CCD class. The teacher shows us some video by some nut. I couldn't even tell you who it was, but he was definitely a young earth creationist. I know this because he flat-out stated that dinosaurs never existed.

At that point, I knew that I wasn't going to be Catholic for much longer.

That's probably why YECs these days go more the Flintstones route with regards to dinosaurs. There's no way I was the only kid who, when faced with a choice between Jesus and Tyrannosaurus Rex, chose the one with sharper teeth.

And that is how dinosaurs made me an atheist.

[Executor32]

You could have posted it in this thread if you were worried about straying from the topic, you know.

[Darth Wong]

I'm curious - why haven't you questioned your faith in God? Do you have any doubts at all? If you don't, why don't you? Are you incurious or used to blind belief

I haven't questioned my faith in God because I've always felt like there's something bigger than me out there. I've never felt any reason to doubt His existence, so I haven't. I've been raised in Christianity, so I suppose it's possible that its blind belief, but isn't that what faith really is.

Of course you never felt a reason to doubt. Reasons are not things that you feel.

[Darth Wong]

I'm going to disagree with you here on the second point. If such a creature as a God existed, there's no particular reason why it wouldn't be able to focus on us.

Not if you simply define him in such a manner that he would do that, instead of being more faithful to the spirit of the original founders of all the major monotheistic religions where he was clearly anthropomorphic in essence.

But there's the rub: God is something we define ourselves, and in order to answer questions or resolve issues about him over the centuries, we simply improved the definition until we were happy with it. But to recognize this is to recognize that God is man-made, like a mathematical theorem. He's a construct: an idea which can be improved or redefined to solve problems, but then he becomes subject to the same critiques which can be applied to any other man-made idea.

[Patrick Degan]

That's what I told myself, but then I asked myself why that worked. After all, when I say "God exists", I'm making a statement about the world outside of me. If faith is blind belief, then how is it a valid path to knowledge of things outside myself? I've also had similar thoughts about how I feel like there's something bigger than me, but then I wonder how my intuitive feelings are a valid path to knowledge - I've encountered enough counterintuitive things in my mathematical and physical training that I simply don't trust my intuition anymore.

Do you have any resolutions to these questions that let me keep my faith in God? If you do, I really would like to know.

Not really. The whole problem boils down to the fact that the proposition "God" is not testable, therefore not falsifiable. There are no parametres by which to establish such tests and the "testimony" of the being's existence is entirely anecdotal and filtered through a book which is at the least 1700 years old at last major edit, and based on entirely untestable assertions and/or tales which have been handed down through n-generations before being committed to any form of print, which in turn has been edited, altered and to some degree inevitably riddled with errors in interpretation.

I'm aware of these problems - my questions above are more concerned with epistemology than with the nature of the proposition "God exists". Whether it can be resolved in the scientific system depends on how precisely "God" is defined, and to my knowledge all well-defined notions of God have been disproved, leaving only the various imprecisely defined notions of God. Those, as you point out, are not testable. But all of this being resolved scientifically requires that I accept only the scientific method as an adequate way of knowing - hence, my questions above: why are these various other alleged paths to knowledge actually valid?

In terms of actually establishing the factual existence of an alleged phenomena, they aren't.

I'm going to disagree with you here on the second point. If such a creature as a God existed, there's no particular reason why it wouldn't be able to focus on us. It's an anthropomorphizing leap to say that God wouldn't focus on us because we wouldn't focus on a dust mote, and useful when reducing an anthropomorphized God ad absurdum, but in general it is not a valid deduction. The third point - whether a first cause existed - is an entirely different question, and one that has a useful geometric resolution IMHO.

No, it's actually anthropomorphising to make the assumption that a creator-god would focus on us at all, precisely because of the scale issue.

[Chris OFarrell]

The first thing that REALLY stuck a splinter under my skin and started to 'irritate' me towards rejecting religion, as a Catholic, was the story of Exodus and the LET MY PEOPLE GO skit as I read the bible one day. Say what you will, the early parts of the bible through Genesis and Exodus are pretty cool for a kid to read, an exciting story and so on.

But one day, something hit me when I got to the whole 'free the slaves' deal.

I mean I'm thinking this is GOD and he is directly communicating with Moses, giving him enormous power and so on, this isn't the 'modern' God who hides up in the clouds of history and religion...

So, why can't just whisk up the slaves and take them to the promised land?

Why can't he just come down in front of the Egyptians and bitchslap them a few times until they get the message?

But no! Instead, he Moses to play pallor tricks on them, AFTER he makes the Kings heart harden so he WON'T listen to him when he does his stuff. And again and agian, God and Moses send down WMD's at Ejypt, each time the King says 'Oh noez, my bad, take this away and I'll let you go!' and each time Moses and God became the biggest fucking suckers in the world as he then points and says 'HA! No letting go for you, double the toiling quota and executions!'. I mean, God can cover the land in flies, turn off the sun, give BOILS to all the Egyptians...but he still keeps waiting for the King to let them go?

Then of course came the death of the First born; ALL First Born regardless of age. I actually became horrifed at that when I REALLY thought about it, babies only a day or two old. Oh sure you MIGHT think they get an express train to Heaven, but in the context of the above, I started to wonder who the fuck this God dude was to put 'his people' through such misery, then mass murder so many innocents, when he has the power -AND is directly using it right now- to do this shit.

And there was plenty of other stuff in this story that just Didn't Make Sense, and then more and more I started to read up on stuff that just Didn't Make Sense about the Religion I was involved in...

[Darth Wong]

I'm going to disagree with you here on the second point. If such a creature as a God existed, there's no particular reason why it wouldn't be able to focus on us. It's an anthropomorphizing leap to say that God wouldn't focus on us because we wouldn't focus on a dust mote, and useful when reducing an anthropomorphized God ad absurdum, but in general it is not a valid deduction. The third point - whether a first cause existed - is an entirely different question, and one that has a useful geometric resolution IMHO.

No, it's actually anthropomorphising to make the assumption that a creator-god would focus on us at all, precisely because of the scale issue.

Perhaps more to the point, one anthropomorphosizes God simply by assuming that it is an entity which is even capable of caring for anyone or anything.