I was raised Christian, and went to church every Sunday. Then I become an adolescent and started to questions things.
It came to the point that the only reason I always answered "Yes, of course" to the "do you believe in God?" question, was because I was terrified of punishment for not believing (whether in the afterlife or my current social standing).
But you must embrace the idea of God, not question or doubt it -- otherwise your faith is false. I grew up saying "yes" immediately to questions of my faith because I thought not hesitating or thinking about it, and answering as if it was a silly question because of course I believe in God, and that meant that I was a firm believer.
I think all Christians are like this, otherwise they wouldn't be so defensive. A firm believer could easily block attacks of their faith by simply not responding, but instead you see pages and pages of arguments of people trying to assure others that the path they chose is the right one, instead you see several thousand years of violence and war because people's faith is so "strong" when it's really the exact opposite. People who try to "save" you, are really just trying to make themselves feel better.
If you love grapefruit, would you be offended if someone else didn't like grapefruit? Would you argue with them? Would you hurt them? Would you kill them? Would you try to convince them that it is delicious when they find it bitter?
This sounds silly because everyone knows that people acquire different tastes for different foods throughout their life.
But when you say you don't have faith in Christ, it's never just an "Oh, ok" response. Every President we've had has been Christian, because if he didn't mention God in at least one of his speeches, he wouldn't get elected. Simply because he didn't like grapefruit.
Simply because the "stout" Christian followers are actually frightened and insecure people -- and who wouldn't be? When I was a just a kid I'd sometimes come to tears because I realized I had committed a sin, and was surely going to hell. If I did something wrong I would prey desperately to God for forgiveness and how I would never do it again.
Then I would assume that God really is good, caring, and loving because nothing bad would happen to be afterwards. Awesome.
However, when I got older I grew sick of the lame and varied explanations of God. I've always been concerned for others, I always asked people, "what happens to my friend if he's Buddhist?" Only to be answered by a "He goes to hell/purgatory" or a candy coated Sunday school special of, "God is with him, God loves everyone, and God forgives."
I've always questioned, "what happens to the billions of people in Eastern Asia?", "what happens to the thousands of Chinese children who died in the earthquake, when they don't even know the idea of God?"
I can't accept that.
It drove me nuts, so I opened my eyes. When I was at church I then realized that 90% of the people attending every Sunday were elderly people, unusually nice older people. People who would participate, donate, and listen to whatever the church decided on.
Just like I was terrified as a child, the elderly crowd is constantly trying to change their habits and become "good" again, and try to affirm a belief that they don't even fully understand themselves -- as long as they win when they die. Religion is an incentive, not a belief.
The kids who attended were like any other. Some were assholes, some were nice. We would answer the same way to questions our mentors asked us. Most kids would stop attending church when they got older, and would only re attend when they had a child of their own.
Now I didn't write this to piss anyone off, to offend anyone, or claim that God doesn't exist. I wrote this because I thought it would be prove as an interesting look at a once devout believer in his faith, who realized his faith was only strong because he beat the logical curiosity out of his head when it came to religion.
Are all Christians insecure about their faith? Maybe, I'm not sure really. I always thought the thoughts in my head were the thoughts of every other Christian, just that they are afraid to talk about it -- as it would show disobedience to God.
I do believe Christianity teaches great morals, that there are just as many "good" Christians as "bad." And I even admit that Church is a fun experience that kids should have.
I just don't believe in being terrified by the unknown, much less attack others for it. I want to believe in God, I want to be assured entrance into Heaven, but it is impossible. There is no way I can completely forget the questions in my head.
Therefore I can never embrace my faith. I can't even say, "I believe" anymore.
Since it is impossible for me to truly believe in something that makes no sense, I won't. I don't want to say I am an atheist, agnostic would be a more accurate term but I can now comfortably say, "No I do not believe in a god."
I feel like my mind has been freed, and that I am able to see beauty in the world that I was not able to see before. I am just going to live my life and appreciate it.
If you are curious how I came about this, it is because I have been listening to Richard Dawkins for the past couple of nights (literrally hours and hours of his speeches, interviews, and excerpts from his book, "The God Delusion" )and I have found everything he says to be nothing short of enlightening.
To anyone else on the fence about religion, I recommend you listen to this man as insight to other possibilities (based on evidence). He has a lot of great speeches on YouTube and QnA sessions run by followers of religion themselves, and you can always check out his books.
He changed my life in 2 nights.
Don't have the grapefruit in your mouth, go and smell the dirt and the grass, go and look at the sky and look at ants doing their work and the birds wandering around and think how you're all connected because of evolution and think how fortunate you are that nature actually made you exist out of sheer luck. There's nothing wrong with seeing the world through this point of view. It may feel that it still lacks something, but that's only because the human mind has been, through thousands of years, been looking for the reasons for things, because that allowed the species to survive better throughout the ages.
Get used to living with mystery. Humans very likely will not get the answers to the BIG questions.
Science is the one you should look for if you want to know what is out there. And what it has already is gratifying enough. It's wonderful enough. It's remarkable enough to entertain and intellectually satisfy the human mind. Sure, the "Why it's there" question comes to mind...but we don't know. We have nothing serious to entertain our heads with yet. Religious ideas and speculations are just entertaining thought-experiments, they're not evidence for anything. They're not 'serious'. If Science says that it hasn't found out anything, or that it doesn't know, then....live with it, learn to cope with the fact that you don't have the answers (yet). There's nothing wrong with that.
Religion makes you think that if you don't have the answers, and that if those answers don't concern the human race, then there's something missing and that you should react emotionally if there's nothing there caring about you. I understand why they say that, but I think they're too attached to how the human mind has been working for the last thousands of years.
Understandably, the human species is still attached to the mental processes that have allowed it to survive and build huts and fires and so on. Religions were useful once, but not today when we have science. Religions showed up because people looked at lightning bolts and the stars, and these thoughts and speculations became useful. They were answers, they offered stability to the uncontrolled desire to suddenly find out answers for everything, and make up stories about them. You could say that Religion was a very early attempt of the human species at Science. Then Religions became more complex, but still just a collateral effect of this survival-based "find out how it works" mindset, and developed, through many thousands of years, to what you have today: such as religions that makes people actually believe that a man will actually descend from the atmosphere and hurt those whom you think deserve it, and god being love, and faith being a leap AFTER reason and they make you think that the "problem" of babies bathed in water is actually a serious discussion you could have. And not only that but if you were to have a completely neutral baby and teach him religion, there really wouldn't be much benefit. There really wouldn't be anything that a well educated kid would not learn without religion. Me, for example, I was never religious and I'm as good as any religious person. Also, one could say that religion basically assures happiness and stability of mind which for the human brain is beneficial. But that to me is creating happiness based on lies. It's like Santa Claus and the fuzzy feeling you wish you could have again when you find out he never existed and you think back how fun it was to go to bed early. Instead of letting people mature out of it, they want to stay with fuzzy feelings, they want the stability that religions offer them, period. They don't care if it's true, or they find themselves ways to think these things are true, or they're ignorant enough to see them as truth from the get go and just not think about them critically. I guess you could say that atheists find their stability of mind, only in finding out the truth of things. They only feel stable in the most intellectually honest, humble mindset they can have on every subject. Even emotions go under the microscope.
Religion honours our irrational experiences and makes the action of taking them seriously, a virtue. I confess, irrational experiences such as loving someone or hallucinating conversations with gods or aliens or having premonitory dreams are damn fascinating and fun and entertaining and they make us feel weird inside because they go against our rationality. But... they're still irrational. Just because it drives our bodies to behave in exhilarating ways does not give it any more credibility. And then you have people claiming that these are actual truths about the universe. Sure, we don't know everything, but I sure as hell am not going to trust hallucinating individuals and dreams to tell me truths about the world. I think Science gives us that. A Scientific way of thinking alone gets us closer to what really is out there. You don't need anything else. It's the most transparent glass through which you can look through at the universe. I think religious people think that the truths out there have to be connected emotionally to ourselves inside our heads. It is this awkward way of thinking, yet understandably only human, that makes me think that Religious claims about truth, in my opinion, should not be listened to.
I feel that people just think that the answers to the big questions are actually going to concern the human race. People think that BIG questions need BIG answers, and that BIG answers would have the word "human" in them. Do you want to bet that most people, besides perhaps scientifically minded atheists, would get really disappointed and have their daily lives actually affected in some way, if the answer didn't involve a deity that cared for the hairless apes of planet earth?
What if the answer is not something big, something interesting for human lives? What if it was just a little fact about the universe? That the facts really don't concern themselves with our lives? Should you let those facts affect your life here on tiny planet earth?
Religion makes you think that the universe was made with an eye for the hairless apes of planet earth. Without any evidence! And religiously based thinking makes you think that you SHOULD feel affected about the universe not caring about us, that existence doesn't exist because of us, and should feel empty and feel hollow and feel something missing. Religious thinking makes the big questions be the most important questions, and especially, they're the questions with the most important answers that there can be for the human mind! And they make those answers have an actual effect on human lives. But the only reason they think these are the most important answers to people is because of tradition, it's tradition of thought. It's only because humans have been doing it for thousands of years. It's considering the big questions to have big answers. And it's all around having faith that the answers to those big questions are very nice for our human minds and are very comfortable answers and those faiths are actually right.
I understand why one would feel the need to have it, but ask yourself why you need it in the first place. Knowing about stuff like evolutionary biology and just science in general, and having a critical eye for things allows you to not only understand the universe better, but getting used to not having the answers. I can't stress how much Science stabilizes the mind in ways that Religion only achieves by creating illusions of intellectual achievement, like faith.
You won;t be bored. You'll be dead - nothing. Like you were for all those years BEFORE you were born. That's my opinion anyway.
haha yeah im afriad that may be true.
but why am i looking through the eyes of the body im in now? why wasnt i the kid born in the other hospital room?
it's nuts to think about.
I'd like to point some things out, PERSONAL OPINION.. I'm not really thinking about if you agree with me or not; I just want to say this, take it or leave it. Fear is part of being a human; after all life is constant uncertainty. Nothing is absolutely true so we can't never stop doubting... by this I mean that there's lot's of interpretations and things are not the same for everybody; what we perceive is all up to our senses and our senses can be deceived. Maybe what's right for me is wrong for others? .. but that doesn't mean I'm entirely wrong. "You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist." ... that's Nietzsche. Faith is:" a belief in the trustworthiness of an idea that one has not proven formally" and a belief is: "the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true." - Nobody can determine if what some people accepted to be true is false and vice versa, so it's up to each person to decide. We don't need to make everybody believe or disbelief... to each their own, right? Ideally, that's how it should be, at least for me. Now, If you ask me, religion and god should be personal things. I shouldn't need to believe in what somebody else told me about god, I should define my own system of believes. Yes, YOU CAN DOUBT, as you SHOULD. There's nothing wrong there.. Why else would you have a brain if you didn't use it that way? Go for it. Use your mind. If you think that something isn't working for you then go find out what's wrong. I'd be more scared if you didn't question things to be honest. I think that perhaps you would find it very beneficial if you studied philosophy. It will really give you more perspective and knowledge. Just a suggestion. [In case you haven't already.. I don't know..] You don't need to identified yourself in a religion to believe in the presence/existence/etc of some sort of deity. You don't need to believe in god if you don't want to.. nothing/nobody/etc should force you. At the end of the day is up to you and what you want to believe not what others tell you to. Find your own answers. End.
Fear is part of being a human; after all life is constant uncertainty. Nothing is absolutely true so we can't never stop doubting... by this I mean that there's lot's of interpretations and things are not the same for everybody; what we perceive is all up to our senses and our senses can be deceived. Maybe what's right for me is wrong for others? .. but that doesn't mean I'm entirely wrong.
"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."
Faith is:" a belief in the trustworthiness of an idea that one has not proven formally" and a belief is: "the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true." - Nobody can determine if what some people accepted to be true is false and vice versa, so it's up to each person to decide. We don't need to make everybody believe or disbelief... to each their own, right? Ideally, that's how it should be, at least for me.
Now, If you ask me, religion and god should be personal things. I shouldn't need to believe in what somebody else told me about god, I should define my own system of believes.
Yes, YOU CAN DOUBT, as you SHOULD. There's nothing wrong there.. Why else would you have a brain if you didn't use it that way? Go for it. Use your mind. If you think that something isn't working for you then go find out what's wrong. I'd be more scared if you didn't question things to be honest.
I think that perhaps you would find it very beneficial if you studied philosophy. It will really give you more perspective and knowledge. Just a suggestion. [In case you haven't already.. I don't know..]
You don't need to identified yourself in a religion to believe in the presence/existence/etc of some sort of deity. You don't need to believe in god if you don't want to.. nothing/nobody/etc should force you. At the end of the day is up to you and what you want to believe not what others tell you to. Find your own answers.
End.
Very well said. Maybe religion just isn't for me.
Maybe I don't like grapefruit, but hey -- at least I tried it =p.
Although I do hope something interesting happens after I die, I hate being bored.
Quote: from Lizzie2007 at 12:10 pm on June 10, 2008 Most of that made a lot of sense to me. I am always questioning things and am starting to slowly lose my faith, I'm afraid. But I'm trying to make sense of everything, but it just doesn't add up a lot to me. I'm still trying to keep faith, but sometimes I feel like I'm doing it just in case there is a God, and if I don't, I'll go to Hell, when deep down I don't really believe in any of that. But I don't know. I've been tormented for years over questions without answers lol That's exactly what I mean. It's like, I'm not sure if theres a God or not but just in case there is -- i'm gonna say, "yes i believe." How is that faith?
Most of that made a lot of sense to me. I am always questioning things and am starting to slowly lose my faith, I'm afraid. But I'm trying to make sense of everything, but it just doesn't add up a lot to me. I'm still trying to keep faith, but sometimes I feel like I'm doing it just in case there is a God, and if I don't, I'll go to Hell, when deep down I don't really believe in any of that. But I don't know. I've been tormented for years over questions without answers lol
That's exactly what I mean. It's like, I'm not sure if theres a God or not but just in case there is -- i'm gonna say, "yes i believe."
How is that faith?
It's not really, I guess. Just fear. Like a safety net. It's a really confusing issue.
My view is very much like yours. Though i don't really care if god/heaven is real or not. I try to think that this life here is all that i have and i believe that motivates me to make my life better.
I do think that religion is full of fear. My parents were raised by strict catholics but ended up being not so great people (alcoholics, cheating, beating their kids) and so every Sunday they would go to church and thought that made everything okay, they thought that They were better then the people that didn't go to church at all. I disagreed with all of it when i turned 13, i told them my lesbian cousin was a better person than them and if she was going to hell then everyone was. I got my ass beat for ever thinking such a thing x_x
i understand you completely, but's it's one major factor you forgot it's type of faith you have that could change everything you just said. you sound catholic, are you? there's millions of questions in my head too, like what happens to babies, and don't think that because it looks as if someone has never even heard of church,isn't the case, just bcuz u don't see their opportunities to meet him, doesn't mean it didn't come before their disaster.
Actually I went to a very laid back and friendly Protestant church with the, "don't worry, God forgives you" philosophy.
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