The Resolution of Doubt.

[Griffon64]

truehobbit - you've taken my half-a-page-and-counting draft response and summed it up in one line ( "what I have examined are the arguments against God - and found them lacking." )

I have some more to say though, and I'll type it up after work this evening if I have a chance to ... I would like to answer Sass's question about what ways my knowledge of God follow to me, how I handle my doubts, etc ... but truehobbit certainly provided the nutshell, there

*zips off back to RL and the piles of coding awaiting there*

[Voronwë the Faithful]

My dear Impy, that was one of the most extraordinary things that I have ever read. Thank you so much for sharing it.

[Jnyusa]

I missed your post first time around, Imp, but read it in your journal. That really was beautiful, and takes a lot of guts to share. Believe me, I know!

That's incredible that Vallins was a member of your Beth Din! Funny thing ... My husband and I were married by a Judge who was later convicted of fraud and removed from office. My mother took me aside on one of our visits to the home town, closed the bedroom door and showed me the newspaper article about him in a whispered voice. She was afraid it invalidated our marriage!

Jn

[Voronwë the Faithful]

That judge obviously failed to assert the sea sponge defense!

[Cerin]

Sea sponge defense?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

http://www.phpbber.com/phpbb/viewtopic. ... fire#13189

[Cerin]

And to draw us back on topic a bit, my English teacher in the 9th or so grade made us all memorize 'Invictus'. I guess she thought it would give us backbone. Even then, it felt very alien to my sense of things.

eta: It just struck me, as I was thinking of the differences between the beliefs reflected there and my own, that that that poem is very like an anti-23rd Psalm. Not meaning, intended as in opposition, but as matter and anti-matter, reflecting virtually antithetical views of the universe.

[Cerin]

have faced our religious beliefs and grappled with questions of faith , primarily the existence of God.

Sass, I thought I would just take your post in little pieces, and this is the piece that struck me first.

I don't recall ever thinking that God might not exist.

I was raised Catholic by non-religious parents, that is, my Catholic-raised father and my protestant-raised mother sent us toddling along alone to St. Finbar's every Sunday (this was in Brooklyn when children were still safe walking alone and people left their babies in baby carriages outside of grocery stores while they went in and weren't arrested for child endangerment or had their children taken from them for neglect -- can that be true?), and we also attended the after school catechism classes.

I can remember feeling very solemn in church (which seemed so large to me as a child), and very solemn on Sunday afternoons after church. I think I would go so far as to say I felt the presence of God in an unformed, child-like way. However, the teachings never quite made sense to me. It was all sort of a mush of guilt and holiness and ritual.

We moved from Brooklyn to a Wisconsin town of 8,000 when I was 14. Our skirts were short. I had never been kissed or even been in a situation where I might be kissed or would have wanted to be kissed (a late developer emotionally), but because of our appearance and because we were from the big city people assumed we were bad girls. We felt the stares on Sunday morning, and in fact I was called into the principal's office frequently for lectures, and on one occasion he actually called me a slut and sent me home to change. Ignorant man. This hardened my attitude considerably. I began to scorn what I saw as the narrow-minded mentality around me and became rebellious, just to make as much trouble as I could for that nasty man. Had I known more and understood more, I wouldn't have given him so much power to shape my life, but it did, quite a bit I think; I kept myself conspicuously distant from the more traditional school involvements and opted for anything that could be seen as protesting against anything.

I didn't think about God much during this time, but I distinctly remember one experience. It's going to sound silly, I'm afraid.

I was, in a move of extraordinary quirkiness, chosen Homecoming Queen. The principal no doubt assumed it was because I had slept with all the boys, but one of them confided in me, 'We picked you because you're not a two-faced b*tch like the other girls.' I the think the truth of the matter was that I had an older boyfriend (well-known and considered as desirable as a boyfriend could possibly be) and so I was free to be unrestrainedly nice to my male peers without having to worry about encouraging undesired attentions and was never in a position to have to reject any of them.

Anyway, it was an odd situation. Some of my politically-oriented friends asked if I would abdicate. Of course I didn't, that would have been rude to those nice boys. But I was intensely - intensely I say -- uncomfortable in the activities that surrounded this whole shlemiel. It wasn't me. I hate being the center of attention. I had to borrow clothing so as to look presentable and respectable. I put my bra back on.

But the zenith of this embarassment, the pinnacle of horror was approached the day of the ... PARADE.

I had a 'court' of two other girls -- bouncy blonde cheerleaders. I was to ride alone in John *******'s T-bird convertible, while my court followed in another car. I can't tell you how sick I felt as this hour approached. How was I to get out of this situation? You think 'dragging her feet' is literary hyperbole? Not so. We walked out to the cars. John was so pleased that he would be driving me. I wanted to throw up.

I did not pray. I was not aware of God. But I desired with all the intensity of my being for the ground to swallow me up.

The T-bird would not start.

I had to ride with the other girls; still an excruciating ordeal, but one I could survive (hiding between the two of them) whereas the other scenario had been unthinkable for me.

I think some people find it silly, and even offensive, to think of a God who could care about the relatively unimportant feelings of discomfort of a high school girl when there are people around the world dying of poverty and torture and enduring other unimaginable horrors. But, that is the concept that I think was cemented by that experience. I can't remember if I thought, 'Oh, God has answered my prayer!', but I did feel certain that a loving power had intervened on my behalf.

And this is, I think, the pattern of growth of faith (though not necessarily always involving such trivial examples!). Something gives one a sense, which is then confirmed in experience. And I wonder if those of you who ended up going the other way lacked confirming experiences, or perhaps had similar experiences but interpreted them differently.

[Primula Baggins]

Cerin, I am one of those people who cannot imagine that God would intervene to make me even happier when he does not intervene in so much human suffering. Yet I've also had moments in my life like that one, where it almost seems more logical to assume that God has intervened, rather than that some amazingly convenient coincidence has occurred as a result of the random operation of the laws of the universe.

[yovargas]

Would this be an inappropriate place to share the story of my loss of faith? If so, let me know and I'll remove this post.

My parents raised me in the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) church, a denomination which has some unusual views but is otherwise a fairly normal Protestant denomenation. They tend to be rather legalistic (lots of rules, specially concerning what you're allowed to do on Sabbaths and also some dietary standards such as vegitarianism) but
normally, not anything too extreme. My parents were very serious about the faith and wanted me to get an SDA education so I went to small SDA schools for nearly all my youth. When I had graduated from my SDA school at 8th grade, my parents wanted to find an SDA high school for me to attend. In my area there were two options - a respectable, accredited, "normal" (by SDA standards) school called
Forest Lake Academy; and a radical, extremist school named Rolling Hills Academy founded by an SDA evangelist who had left the official church and founded his own branch because he thought the official church was far too moderate. Forest Lake Academy cost nearly $5000 a year. Rolling Hills Academy was under $1000 a year. My parents were poor. I went to Rolling Hills Academy (RHA).

RHA was a place where everything was considered immoral or corrupting. TV was bad. Non-religious music was bad. Video games were bad (two kids got suspended when the principal found out the played Mortal Kombat at home). Modern dress styles were bad (girls had strict codes on how high their skirts could come up and jewelry was forbidden). Any expression of sexuality was bad (one couple got expelled for kissing on a field trip). Competitive sports were bad. Eating absolutely anything animal-based was bad. Everything was bad and the entire faculty was more or less nuts.

Interestingly enough, coming into this environment after being in a moderate school, behavior which was seen as completely normal and harmless at my previous school got me labelled something of a rebel at RHA. While being a rebel makes you have constant run-ins with authority, it seems to do wonders for your "coolness" factor. Though
the faculty largely couldn't stand me, I had more friends then I'd ever had or have ever had since. Going to school there was absurd and maddening on a constant basis, but with all my newfound friends I was actually having a lot of fun. Having been a fairly lonely child, I probably felt happier at the time then I'd ever been. And then, in 1994, near the end of my 1st semester of my sophomore year there, the
principal told me that I could not come back for the 2nd semester - I was being expelled. The official reason? The principal had overheard me telling some friends about a Saturday Night Live skit I'd thought was funny. The principal thought the discussion was highly inappropriate and that I had become a negative influence on the people around me, so I had to leave in two weeks at the end of the semester. I was upset by this news, but not nearly as upset as I would become within the coming days.

I begun to pray to God. Now, I had prayed fairly regularly throughout most of my young life. Though as a young kid one doesn't necessarily feel the need for prayer, living the relatively carefree life of youth, I still felt it was important to try and "stay in contact" with God. And the hyper-strict, hyper-religious teachings of my school, obnoxious as they were, had been very succesful at making me want to get closer to God. So I was praying to God, not necessarily frequently, but regularly. But the prayers were rarely more then the benign "Thank you for being so good and great, please forgive my sins, Amen" kind of prayer. But now, with the upcoming expulsion from my school, I had a bit of a crisis and so naturally I went to God with my problem.

I was praying a lot during these days (at least for me), probably two or three times a day. As the short days I had at RHA passed, I was increasingly upset by the feeling that I was going to be cut off from a lot of my friends. The more upset I became, the more I prayed. What was I praying for? Not for God to change the principal's mind, or even for God to help me keep all my good friends. I was praying to find out the simple answer to the simple question: is this God's will? Is me leaving this school part of God's plan for my life? Or does God disapprove of the principal's decision because RHA is where I should be? The more upset I became, the more I needed to know what God wanted. I was scared! For the first time that I could remember, due to the expulsion, I was going to have to go to a public school. The
private SDA schools that I went to spoke of public schools as if they were filled with nothing but hooligans, drugs, and violence. I was terrified of where I was going, deeply saddened by the upcoming loss of my social group and I needed to know for my comfort and peace of mind - is this God's will?

So I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed. Nothing. A couple of days before my last day at RHA, I was getting ready to go to school for the morning. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, looked in the mirror, pondered my situation, and begun to cry. Not just cry, but sob, and desperately. In my overly-emotional, teenage head, I was desperate and I cried more intensely then I've ever cried in my entire life. And so, in deep pain, I once again began to pray to God and to pray harder then I'd ever done before. In my mind, I was screaming at God for an answer, for some comfort, for some enlightenment, for some SOMETHING. What I got was nothing. That morning, I cried and I prayed to the point that I felt emotionally numb, a numbness that would follow me for the next several years. By the time, I left that bathroom, I hated God.

The following years were emotionally terrible, and particularly the one semester I spent in public school was pure hell, easily the worst period of my life. I sank into a severe depression, became highly reclusive and antagonistic towards people, and often felt suicidal. Put simply, I had been raised to believe that God was everything, but I now hated God and therefore had nothing to live for. In some sense I think that I felt during this time that God had betrayed me the only time I'd ever needed him, but this was all felt rather then rationalized. In other words, I never said to myself "I hate God because he abandoned me" or anything, it was more of a gut, emotional reaction that was a part of the bigger emotionally jumbled mess my life was during this period. (To help things out even more <sarcasm>, very soon after this religious downfall I also begun to realize I was gay, which could have only further my emotional turmoil. Though in hindsight I contend that my issues with God were by far the bigger issue I had).

With this newfound hatred towards God, I begun to call myself an atheist. This was mostly an act of rebellion, not really any philosophical stance, since at the time I didn't really comprehend what atheism meant. At the time, it probably stood more for Not Christian, which is what I really was. After my semester in public school, my parents decided to send me to Forest Lake Academy (FLA - the "respectable" SDA school my parents hadn't been able to afford). FLA was vastly more moderate then RHA, but it still had religious courses and religion, God, and the Bible were common topics in the general school discussion. My attitude towards God at this point led
me, in some ways, to try and find reasons to hate God. So in all the religious talk, I started to look for flaws in the religious armor. I would pick on and grab on to inconsistencies I saw in the Bible, fallicies I saw in our doctrine, illogical ideas I saw about God. Though still clouded by all my teenage angst, this is important to
note because it began a rational examination of the facts. My conclusions weren't even remotely unbiased, but they were slowly becoming rational.

I think during this period, I somewhat subconciously gathered a lot of evidence against religion. I was steeped in a religious environment and seeing things left and right which just didn't add up. But clearly even though I called myself an atheist I still believed in God - hell, I was still angry at him (though I had long since forgotten why)! Fortunately, the later part of my last year of high school had been fairly pleasant and I begun to slowly come out of my depression. I was now able to begin looking more clearly into what The Truth was.

There were three things that I encountered within a few weeks of each other in the summer of 1997 which had a significant impact on my beliefs and would kick-start the philosophical inquiry that continues to this day. Those three things were the movie Contact (which I highly recommend if you enjoy these religious discussions we have around here), a collection of essays on Darwinism, and probably most importantly a book called The History of God. The primary impact of the first two was primarily to simply open my mind to other possibilities. Up to this point, I think I had only genuinely considered two options: Christianity or Nothingness. And by Nothingness I don't even mean atheism which IS something or at least can be something, but a true lack of belief in anything in life (which was my attempted route earlier and led to my hatred of my own life). But these openned my mind to other options, other
possibilities that I now needed to explore.

But it was History of God that revolutionized my previous conceptions of God. If you're unfamiliar with the book, it attempts to give a very detailed historical account on the birth and growth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam starting around Abraham and moving all the way to the present. Reading the book's notion of human's perception of God - even within the same religion - changing and evolving throughout time to fit the current ideals of humanity, left me with what I felt was an inevitable conclusion, IF God existed, the true knowledge of who or what he is has long been lost during the many, many years of human change. With this new notion in hand, combined with the evidence against Christianity I had gather over the past few years, I was now able to legitamately call myself an agnostic. This was hugely important in my life because my new status as a real agnostic cast doubt on God's existence. Since I was able to rationally conclude that God might not be there, I could finally let go of the immense anger I had carried towards God for nearly three years. Removing this anger from my life was one of the most positive things to ever happen in my life.

After this it was merely a gradual decline in reasons to believe in God with a gradual increase in reasons not to. I met Wolfie a few months after my revelations and we were both filled with all sorts of ideas at the time. We helped each other immensely by giving each other someone to bounce all of our wild notions off of and to clarify some of the philosophical mess that we had. I kept calling myself agnostic for a few years, but I think that was partially because I still had in my mind some notion of atheism being bad in some way. Atheism had always been discussed negatively around me so I think I might have been a bit reluctant because of it. But that stopped when I encountered the philospher Ayn Rand who for me completely annihalated the idea of agnosticism, and gave me the intellectual ability to call myself an atheist proudly and significantly. (Note: This does not mean that I am a follower of Rand, just that her ideas highly influenced me).

So now I confidently call myself an atheist. Philosophically, I am more comfortable now then I have ever been in my life. This is not to say I think I know everything I need to, but that I am confident about many of the conclusions I have come to regarding God and religion.

Goodness, did anybody actually read this far! If you did, you're nuts!

That story stops about four years ago, roughly. The journey has continued. Someday I'll share the rest of it somewhere. I'll briefly say that my faith in atheism is slipping.

[Cerin]

I would venture to say that this was the perfect place for you to post that, yov. Thank you.

[Impenitent]

I don't know whether it verges on voyeurism, but I love the personal stories! I eat up these insights into the way others think and feel and operate.

Thanks Yov.

Jewel, Vinnie, Jn, thank you.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thanks, Yov. I look forward to Part Two.

[Sassafras]

Cerin wrote:

And this is, I think, the pattern of growth of faith (though not necessarily always involving such trivial examples!). Something gives one a sense, which is then confirmed in experience. And I wonder if those of you who ended up going the other way lacked confirming experiences, or perhaps had similar experiences but interpreted them differently.

That's what I've always thought, Cerin ... that certain experiences which some might easily interpret as God's benevolent intervention were nothing more than happy accident.

I'll give a couple of rather extreme examples which actually did happen to me.

Without being melodramatic, I believe I have looked death in the face on at least two occasions ... I was 19 the first time I was attacked by a total stranger ... as incredible as it sounds, I was inside Carnegie Hall ... having come in early so I could listen to the rehearsal of Beethoven's 9th by the incomparable von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic ... I was in the Dress Circle, 3 floors up from the orchestra and completely alone in the great hall ... just me and the music. Or so I thought. But I was being watched ... perhaps he'd followed me in from the street ... I don't know but suddenly I was thrown to the ground with a rope around my neck which cut me off in mid scream ... all I could think was I don't want to die! I MUSN'T die like this! so I drummed my heels on the floor, tried to buck him off of me and scratched at his face. He bit me and to this day I carry the marks of his teeth on two of my fingers .... I must have put up one hell of a fight and perhaps he was afraid someone would hear the struggle .... but he finally released me and I let out a blood-curdling scream which cut through the orchestra and the chorus and I ran, I flew, with the wind at my heels down three flights of stairs into safety.

A much older friend, poet and mentor, used to say I have a guardian angel ....
was she right? Or was this, and my other narrow escapes ... 3 in all, also involving violent random attacks by total strangers, instead attributable to my own determination, my own physical strength (I've always deceptively strong) and a fortunate set of circumstances.

I don't recall ever once even considering that God, or any benign entity, might have interfered and prevented my death. Instead, the overriding feeling I took away from those awful experiences was one of the utmost distaste and mistrust for most of humanity.
.
.
.
.
yov ... I read Ayn Rand when I was 17. She had quite an influence upon me, too.

[Cerin]

Sass, that's just horrible beyond words.

I can well understand why you would attribute your escape to your own strength and determination, it sounds as though you fought with every ounce of it. That takes courage as well.

And that you've experienced that more than once. I'm so sorry!

[Teremia]

I am so moved by these stories! (And terrified by Sass's last one -- attempted murder in Carnegie Hall!!!!)

My toe is in this water, but I haven't quite figured out yet whether I'm going to jump in.

[Impenitent]

I posted in so distracted a state earlier today that I neglected to acknowledge Cerin's post, though I had intended to because as I read it I was reminded of the still, small voice which spoke to Moses. Religious insight, that aha! moment, doesn't always arrive with the sound of cymbals and tindrels.

Sass...[edit: I swore! Inappropriate for this thread] How terrifying! I've got goosebumps.

[Holbytla]

I was born and raised a Catholic. Until about 6 years ago, I participated in that religion with varying degrees of interest. Perhaps about ten years ago, I reached the zenith of my belief in that religion.
I no longer consider myself Catholic, and I am quite sure the church doesn't either.

I haven't really come to any conclusions about my beliefs or dis-beliefs, but I am quite sure I am against organized religions.
As I have become older, I have grown more cynical and less trusting of people on the whole. For some reason though I have become more trusting in individuals.

To me, religions are man made and have caused the world extreme ills over the centuries. People have killed, robbed, raped, pillared and plundered in the name of religions. I can't help but think that this is the exact opposite of what religions were meant to be. I just can't buy into something, that a person no better than anyone else and many times worse, preaches. I am pretty sure I know right from wrong and I don't feel the need of a mere human dictating to me what I should and should not do.

My personal belief is an entirely different story. I do believe in something. I am just not sure what that something is. I don't believe the human mind can fully grasp the question of life, death or the existence of some being or force so vastly different and incomprehensible to us. To make up for our inept knowledge we create religions so we can mask the fear of the unknown.

As I said, I do believe in something. I do not think that a Big Bang just materialized out of nowhere and poof here we are. I do believe in the Big Bang, but I also believe something made that bang happen. I am pretty sure we exist somewhere, but where is this somewhere? Was there a somewhere before the universe happened? All those things are incomprehensible to me. I don't think we have to know everything. I don't think we were made to know everything. Including the existence or not of some kind of ultimate force or being.

I am just going to live my life as best I can given what I know and believe. Enjoy the ride and see what happens.
I believe in some purpose or reason, but I don't have to put a name on that or know exactly what it is.

I believe that faith is a personal thing, not a community thing. It is different for every individual.

I am not here spouting facts, just my opinion. I could be completely wrong and my opinion is no better than that of anyone else. For all I know, the Jews, Christians, Buddhist, Muslims, etc could be totally right.
I don't know and I don't feel the need to know.

[tinwë]

My experience was a bit different from others here, although Prim may be able to relate a bit.

I grew up in the church - literally. My father is a Methodist minister, and from the day I was born until I was eighteen years old virtually everything that I did revolved around the church. All of my friends were church friends, all of my social life took place in the church. It was all quite normal to me and I never really knew anything else.

But, the mystique, the awe, the wonder that many people feel for religion, was never there for me. The building where people came to worship wasn’t some holy place, it was a building like any other building, it had a leaky roof and backed up sewers, the trash had to be taken out and floors had to be waxed (one of many jobs that I had at the various churches my dad served at). And that guy up there behind the pulpit on Sunday mornings was not some revered saintly figure, he was dad. He walked around the house in his underwear in the mornings, and he got cranky when dinner wasn’t served on time.

It was weird growing up as a preachers kid. My friends thought it was just the strangest thing they had ever heard of. They imagined that my family spent all of our time kneeling by the alter, holding hands and praying and reading Bible stories to each other all the time. We didn’t. My home life was, in nearly every respect, just like anybody else’s. But I always imagined that there was something missing. I convinced myself that I didn’t really have a dad like the other kids, I had a preacher. (It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the opposite was true - I always had a dad, but I never had, and still do not have, a preacher.)

I don’t know exactly when I started to feel resentment towards the church. The fact that I had a very rocky relationship with my father didn’t help. But the thing that clinched it for me was the moving. The Methodist Church, you see, has a policy that preachers move to different churches every so often. We moved on average once every four years when I was growing up. The worst, the absolute worst, for me, was when I was sixteen years old. I had spent the previous four years working my butt off to fit in to the place we had been living at, trying to make friends, trying to be accepted. After four years I had finally reached a point where I felt comfortable. And then I was told that I had to leave it all behind and go start over somewhere else. I was devastated. The last two years of high school were the most miserable years of my life. I became reclusive, I refused to make friends, I used drugs and drinking to numb the pain. By the time I started college I was pretty much a full blown alcoholic.

I blamed the church for my problems, and after I finished high school and went out on my own I quit going to church. (The irony is that I spent the next two summers working at a church camp, which I absolutely loved - that was one of the happiest times of my life, but it was like another life that I lived, and once it was over it was completely over.) I haven’t attended church regularly since I was eighteen years old, nearly twenty four years now. And I can’t see myself going back, for many reasons. For starters, the idea of someone other my dad preaching is just inconceivable to me. The few times I have listened to other preachers I couldn’t stand it, I kept thinking “this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s doing it all wrong!” Also, my extreme introverted nature makes the experience of going to church physically painful to me. I don’t like being in social situations like that at all. But mostly I just don’t have any desire to go, it’s not important to me and I can’t seem to conjure any reason to care.

You’ll notice that none of this has anything to do with whether I believe in God or not. I do. But it’s impossible for me to separate the experiences of my childhood from my thoughts on religion. God is another matter. I have never really doubted the existence of God, although I make no claims to know who or what God is. I have always called myself a Christian, but I understand that has more to do with my background than where I am now. For instance, I strongly believe that participation in the Church is an integral part of being a Christian, but I don’t go myself. I can say that I believe in Christ, but what I believe most is his teachings about how we are to live in this life, primarily how we are to get along with one another. I can understand and appreciate the concepts of salvation and the resurrection, but I have no opinion as to whether it’s true or not. I just don’t know. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. I don’t find it to be terribly important. Likewise, I find things of value in many other religions.

But I do believe in God. I do believe in a creator, in a source for all that is good, in a healing power of love and forgiveness that will one day, be it in this life or the next, take away all pain and suffering. I’m sure part of it just wishful thinking, but another part is gut instinct. It’s in my nature to believe in such a thing, and I could no less not believe in it than an atheist could believe in it.

[vison]

tinwë.

Thanks for telling us your story.

I am always amazed and delighted and touched by what people have to say.

No one has a "common life". Every one of us is a wonder.