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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I can't see myself quoting the 21st century rendition of that from memory in thirty years' time - you can't beat it. And no I don't want to know how many errors I've made!
"Believing in your own hallucinations is called insanity.
Believing in someone else's delusions is called religion".
...
And then there was Job, who held up under all that adversity. But everyone else around him died. I had a lot of pity on the family of Job who paid such a high price. I hope that they did get a place in Heaven for what they went through on earth.
I am so simple and naive. When I read about orders to go wipe out all the people living in a land, including women and children, I don't know what to think. I'm glad we didn't have that in the New Testament.
I find myself wondering as I read or hear things from the Bible -- how much is God and how much is Man writing? And I find myself wondering why we spend so much time worshiping Jesus when he said not to praise him, but the one who sent him. I do like that. It is so simple and undistorted.
I have no idea what Heaven is like. Maybe we are fully spirit then and live in a Collective, sort of like the Changelings do on their planet in Star Trek. I just hope I don't get cast into a lake of fire because I have trouble with the Old Testament.
How do you reconcile this with Biblical accounts like these acts, attributed to God, but hardly compassionate or in any similar category?
1. Abraham's near sacrifice of his own son because God commanded it. Killing one's son today would be a felony and possibly a capital crime.
2. The massive loss of human and animal life during the 40 day flood. What harm did the animals do to deserve to be drowned?
3. The murder of the first born of Egyptian families to convince the Pharoah to allow the Israelites to leave. That might even be considered an act of terror because it's a mass murder.
4. The vicious treatment of Joseph by his brothers.
5. Turning Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, if that's even possible, which I doubt.
There are other instances as well. I raise these not to provoke conflict but to point out that the concept of a loving god which ignores these acts for which he is allegedly responsible hardly reflects compassion.
How do the believers here reconcile this inconsistency?
You cannot hope to understand God - when the Church says things like "in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life" that knowledge is not the same as understanding. It is an awareness, the 'fear' as in 'fear of God', that God is in the world and you had better conduct yourself accordingly. That is also why in most traditions God's name is unpronounceable: this makes the point that God's true nature is not within human beings' grasp to understand.
Unfortunately, the repetitive tendency of one religion after another, or its leaders rather, since time began to claim that it has cracked the puzzle and hit on the only acceptable approach to belief has been responsible for some - nothing like all, there have been great atheist murderers and tyrants too - of humanity's very worst behaviour through the ages. But it's when people depart from their founding principles that this happens, not when they keep to them. There is no commandment to burn anyone at the stake, and as far as I know no sura that recommends the beheading of elderly archaeologists or the suicide of teenage girls. It's the use of faith as a political weapon that leads to these grotesque perversions.
professor! She taught that religion and God was a man made phenomenon - to explain away hurricanes, drought, plague etc and later to control the regular folk which in turn gave power and riches to "the church" - pointing out in medieval and Elizabethan times that popes, bishops and the like wielded more power than royalty. The hope of heaven and fear of hell kept people in line. When she talked about the bible being the greatest work of man made fiction ever produced I was like "WHAT?". While it was revolutionary to me I half expected God to smite the the building at any moment.
So I begin my reading of the bible with an open mind - but already know it's likely at best a loose interpretation of reality - I'm mean, does anyone really think Noah lived to be well over 500 years old?
That's exactly why I'm a recovering Catholic -- and I don't mean drugs. A nun once asked me to define "faith." My answer was "continuing to believe in something even when reason tells you not to." She said my comment was borderline heretical. I said "If God gave me a brain, I'm sure He meant for me to use it. ... How can I build faith without the freedom to ask questions?"
Compared to a lot of Bible-thumpers in my Bronx neighborhood, I don't overvalue my place on Earth. As a spiritual being having a human experience, my moral compass is naturally set to be a better man, a better person, and a better human being. I don't need a church or some religious formula to do these things, because my religion is to LOVE & RESPECT everyone else as long as they don't put their hands on me.
Here in America, organized religion is a business. Too many holy rollers dictating what to think, how to behave, what to do with your money, even what to wear where. Here in the Bronx, many of my neighbors go to church to hook up with married people; yet believe that condoms are a sin. ... Practicing what you preach is a mere ideal.
There's nothing wrong with having doubts and shaking the foundations of Christendom every now and then. At least you're being true to yourself. When you're a kind, self-respecting person with an even bigger heart there's no need to be validated by others. The snag we run into sometimes is that our logic threatens
In our country, there's freedom of religion but no freedom from it.
RainMom, I did tutor various subjects at a community college level but never actually taught as a professor at a college level. I did take a lot of history courses - I loved them! I found it so fascinating and it put so many things about life, politics, countries, wars and more into perspective.
I would agree with your professor on everything you wrote that she taught. This is I think how history from the beginning of time helps people see the commonalities in religions, as well as the differences.
I've always thought that the Greek gods were the most like human beings - fighting, carousing, loving, manipulating...they weren't so elevated and perfect that they were beyond belief. It was more as if they each had their own turfdoms, rather than onmipotency.
What's also interesting, if not fascinating are the cultures that worshipped women in various ways, whether it was as mothers and givers of life, or as deities.
Eddie, I fully, totally agree that organized religion is a business. I also consider it institutionalized as well as organized. And it's a business with generous tax breaks.
1. "Well now would you look at that! A sheep! Phew now I won't have to sacrifice Isaac after all…" (or possibly he'd been thinking Isaac was turning into a right clingy little brat and could he please have Ishmael back? - but then relented.)
2. If everyone had listened, and spent less time mocking Noah and more getting busy with a few more arks, maybe we'd still have unicorns. But I don't think animals ever do do anything to deserve their fate, do they? Just happens.
3. I do have trouble with, but then I have trouble with rather a lot of the haggadah. "God hardened Pharoah's heart" - why??? It is somewhat easier to imagine internal wrangling in the advanced Egyptian bureaucracy and the overturning of labour relations concessions, don't you think? - but administrative problems in the civil service of the time wouldn't make anything like as gripping a story.
4. How would you have liked Joseph for a brother? And what kind of idiot tells his much larger and more numerous brothers that he had a dream in which they all bowed down to him? He did do quite a lot to deserve what he got.
5. It's a seismically active region. Look at Herculaneum and you can see what they meant. She should have done as she was told and run as fast as her little legs would carry her.
My personal suspicion is that when a particular person says that God made him do it, if you listen carefully you might hear a metaphysical voice saying "What?! No I didn't!" Or, in other cases, "Good idea of mine, I thought."
And as for the Book of Esther - ! Read between the lines and you've got an absolute blockbuster of love, pride, power and death there. Most unsuitable for children.
I know I'm on dangerous ground here, and that there are many people who do consider the Bible to be if not physically written by (how, exactly?) then directly received from God. And I am happy for them if that is how they best make sense of their faith. But I don't see it as a requirement for faith. It is history and prophesy and a valuable account of human development, including its regrettable aspects - and you can learn from bad examples as well as good ones, after all.
You know what's fascinating is the time of Babylon, etc.. when the Bible mentions the Nephilims (giants). These giants are the off-springs of the kicked out angels ('fallen angels' by others) and a human parent. The offsprings came out to be giants. It reminds me so much of those mythology stories we read in middle school. You know, Hercules, etc... Humans with super strength...
As an atheist non believer I've got my headstone all figured out. It will say:
ALL DRESSED UP WITH NO PLACE TO GO
Sure hope I'm wrong........
My point is just that I didn't "lose faith" because of some crisis in my life, or some horrid catastrophe. I simply didn't believe what didn't make sense to me. I'm not intolerant of other people's beliefs, and I never proselytize for atheism. I've given it a lot of thought over a number of years, and I am content where I am at.