Believers: How do you have faith?

I lost whatever faith I might have had at the age of ten and I'd probably come out closer to the atheist end of the spectrum than agnostic. The odd thing is, though, that I kind of wish I did have faith. It seems like a beautiful thing and while many atrocities have been done in the name of religion, personal faith seems to bring comfort and pleasure to those who have it.

So how do you have faith? How do you believe? How do you look at the world and say that there's magic out there?

Faith is something I've always envied, but it seems as though as soon as I left childhood behind it was beyond me.

Well, I don't know if there is a 'how'. Faith isn't an act of will. It just ... is.

I realize how completely unsatisfying an answer that is. I intellectually know all of the (eminently reasonable) arguments against higher powers. I can't refute them. But deep in my gut/lizard brain - I believe in something.

I'm highly agnostic, and I know I can't prove anything, so I don't try to convince people to agree with my worldview.

Zuul, babe, you just asked me to describe color to the blind.

For me, it starts with a truth: There is a god. The way I view God is through a Christian lens, but that's neither here nor there to the idea of faith in general. When I start with the idea that God has a hand in all things, I work from there. It doesn't get in the way of believing other things are true, at least for me.

When my father was laying on the operating table, chest cracked open for a double bypass surgery, I prayed for the doctors, that they would keep steady hands and cool heads. I'm sure there were people crowded into the waiting room who were praying for my father by name, but I figured God had given the men and women in the operating room the intelligence to become doctors and nurses and the desire to heal people, so He'd already helped my dad by inspiring those who've chosen to work in the medical profession.

The story I usually use is that someone draws a picture. If I see that picture, I might be able to tell a lot about how it was drawn. I might even be able to tell you about the paper or the pencil. Now, if I take that picture and show it to someone else, he has no proof that the artist is who I say he is. That doesn't mean the artist didn't draw the picture.

I don't accept that humanity's burgeoning understanding of the world around us is some sort of proof that God doesn't exist. If anything, I think it's proof to the contrary. I see inspiration as part of the divine, and the desire to learn and go on to teach as a calling that's just as much from God as the desire to join the ministry. It just doesn't make sense for me not to believe in God.

How? seems like the wrong word to describe it. It's like how do you make a lasagne, how do you change a car tyre? Faith isn't something you can learn to have, it's more something you feel and throught that try to gain understanding.

There is no logical explanation to it at all in the slightest. It's not some mechanical action you can learn, its more an instinct or attempt to try and reconcile our existence as meaning something more than being nothing other than a bag of atoms wandering around a freak occurance of nature.

To be honest, I think people are either born that way or not. I'm a believer, in a wishy-washy way, but the faith of some people I know astounds me. The way they know God and feel the presence is like an extra sense...not anything I could ever imagine having.

I was a believer til i wasn't. I was an adult when I decided it was all a load of cobblers. I don't know why I believed for so long, but I can't get back to that point.

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Originally posted by Sarahfeena

To be honest, I think people are either born that way or not.

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100% agree, which is why I don't attack other people's faith; only the things they do in its name. I think you're either wired to believe in the supernatural or not. I really detest how Christian preachers exhort you to believe in Jesus, as if it were a choice. The best I could do is act as if I believed, which I did for years, hoping I would get some sort of epiphany that would make me a believer like others around me.

If there is a God out there, he knows I can't believe in him and he knows he made me this way.

Yeah, I think that's the reality of it, OCS. Conversely, I think it's funny that people congratulate themselves on how smart they are for being rational and not believing, when it really has nothing to do with intelligence.

What sort of makes me inwardly laugh is people like myself...very non-woo and rational about most supernatural stuff, but still believing there is some sort of supreme being (which I of course conceptualize as the Judeo-Christian god). I mean, come on...it's ALL woo. Catholicism is my religion, but it's complete woo...good, old-fashioned, respectable woo. :woowoo:

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Originally posted by OneCentStamp

I think you're either wired to believe in the supernatural or not. I really detest how Christian preachers exhort you to believe in Jesus, as if it were a choice. The best I could do is act as if I believed, which I did for years, hoping I would get some sort of epiphany that would make me a believer like others around me.

If there is a God out there, he knows I can't believe in him and he knows he made me this way.

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Yeah, this certainly sounds like my experience. It just seems like something I don't have, though I've tried and I've faked it to no avail.

Zuul, you say you kinda want to have faith. That's an understandable impulse, to be sure. But I'm going to say something incredibly stupid, especially in the context of some of the excellent posts above:

Try not to want it.

When I was younger I believed in a Christian god. When I was a bit older I believed in "something", but it was a vague nonsensical mix of spiritualism. Now I don't believe in anything that could be defined as religious, and because of this I now get most of the benefits of faith whereas before I didn't.

What's that, you say? It's odd, I know, but it boils down to this - if you are the sort of person who can believe, faith is good. If not, it distracts you from what would be good for you. I'll elaborate by way of a few examples.

One of the benefits of faith is it is inspiring. If you are a believer, the notion that there is a higher power, a purpose to all this, can indeed be inspiring. But for me, I'm the exact opposite - the chaotic, ungoverned nature of the universe is truly beautiful. Emergence (as relates to chaotic systems) is one of those things that once I learned about it, I started seeing it everywhere. Life, humanity, society, all these things can be argues to be emergent - that is, they are complex systems that arose from simple interactions over a lot of time.

The most inspiring thing about this, for me at least, is that our destiny is our own, as individuals and as a whole. There is no divine plan for us. The future is ours to shape.

Which leads into another benefit of faith, that it gives you hope. If you know that God is watching out for you, that can give you hope. If you know that you have the power to change and control your own life, that your destiny is solely your responsibility and your opportunity... well, it's what gets me out of bed in the morning.

I could go on, but you get the idea. You don't need Faith to have faith - in fact, if it doesn't come naturally to you, Faith might just be an obstacle on your path.

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Originally posted by AllWalker

One of the benefits of faith is it is inspiring. If you are a believer, the notion that there is a higher power, a purpose to all this, can indeed be inspiring. But for me, I'm the exact opposite - the chaotic, ungoverned nature of the universe is truly beautiful. Emergence (as relates to chaotic systems) is one of those things that once I learned about it, I started seeing it everywhere. Life, humanity, society, all these things can be argues to be emergent - that is, they are complex systems that arose from simple interactions over a lot of time.

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I'm glad that inspires you. I would be absolutely horrified to think that I wasn't even the product of dominos falling (because someone would have to set them up and tap the first one). *shudder*

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Originally posted by AllWalker

Which leads into another benefit of faith, that it gives you hope. If you know that God is watching out for you, that can give you hope. If you know that you have the power to change and control your own life, that your destiny is solely your responsibility and your opportunity... well, it's what gets me out of bed in the morning.

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How are God watching out for you and you having the power to control and change your own life mutually exclusive, though? I don't know any Christians who don't believe that they have free will. Yes, there's the idea of lifting lifting decisions up to God, but that doesn't mean that God immediately starts pulling your magic strings like some puppeteer. Free will is universal, whether you believe that God is intervening in your life or not.

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Originally posted by Marsilia

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Originally posted by AllWalker

One of the benefits of faith is it is inspiring. If you are a believer, the notion that there is a higher power, a purpose to all this, can indeed be inspiring. But for me, I'm the exact opposite - the chaotic, ungoverned nature of the universe is truly beautiful. Emergence (as relates to chaotic systems) is one of those things that once I learned about it, I started seeing it everywhere. Life, humanity, society, all these things can be argues to be emergent - that is, they are complex systems that arose from simple interactions over a lot of time.

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I'm glad that inspires you. I would be absolutely horrified to think that I wasn't even the product of dominos falling (because someone would have to set them up and tap the first one). *shudder*

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Really? How odd. It does seem like there's a fundamental difference in thought process between us when it comes to this stuff. Ever since my first chemistry class, I've been fascinated by the way that minerals form as a result of those simple interactions AllWalker mentions. It's a beautiful symphony of different elements, building on one another for greater and greater complexity. Could it be that some being beyond our ability to understand put those rules into place? Maybe, but there being a universal programmer writing a giant version of Boids doesn't change what we've observed.

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Originally posted by Marsilia

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Originally posted by AllWalker

Which leads into another benefit of faith, that it gives you hope. If you know that God is watching out for you, that can give you hope. If you know that you have the power to change and control your own life, that your destiny is solely your responsibility and your opportunity... well, it's what gets me out of bed in the morning.

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How are God watching out for you and you having the power to control and change your own life mutually exclusive, though? I don't know any Christians who don't believe that they have free will. Yes, there's the idea of lifting lifting decisions up to God, but that doesn't mean that God immediately starts pulling your magic strings like some puppeteer. Free will is universal, whether you believe that God is intervening in your life or not.

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I don't think he's saying that to believe in God is to not believe in free will. Simply that understanding he does have control over his own destiny gives him hope.

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Originally posted by Zuul

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Originally posted by Marsilia

I'm glad that inspires you. I would be absolutely horrified to think that I wasn't even the product of dominos falling (because someone would have to set them up and tap the first one). *shudder*

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Really? How odd. It does seem like there's a fundamental difference in thought process between us when it comes to this stuff. Ever since my first chemistry class, I've been fascinated by the way that minerals form as a result of those simple interactions AllWalker mentions. It's a beautiful symphony of different elements, building on one another for greater and greater complexity. Could it be that some being beyond our ability to understand put those rules into place? Maybe, but there being a universal programmer writing a giant version of Boids doesn't change what we've observed.

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No, it doesn't change what's been observed, and I do think the "How?" of things is very cool, at least in as far as I understand it. However, I find the idea that we're a product of random chaos and nothing more than the end result of molecules knocking into eachother and getting stuck really depressing.

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Originally posted by Marsilia

No, it doesn't change what's been observed, and I do think the "How?" of things is very cool, at least in as far as I understand it. However, I find the idea that we're a product of random chaos and nothing more than the end result of molecules knocking into eachother and getting stuck really depressing.

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For me, it's the idea of entropy and all of this ending that's depressing. I know the universe began and I know that all of these physical laws had to exist exactly as they do to make this world we see, so the beginning doesn't have much of an effect on me. The thought of this not existing, though, is something that bothers me.

Order out of chaos doesn't worry me nearly as much as chaos out of order. If there's a mural on the ground and someone can show me how it came about from a jar of beads being thrown down and interacting so as to create the image, that's amazing and glorious and wonderful to me, even if there is no artist. But seeing something beautiful destroyed, whether it was created randomly or with purpose, is devastating to me.

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Originally posted by Marsilia

No, it doesn't change what's been observed, and I do think the "How?" of things is very cool, at least in as far as I understand it. However, I find the idea that we're a product of random chaos and nothing more than the end result of molecules knocking into eachother and getting stuck really depressing.

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Originally posted by Zuul

For me, it's the idea of entropy and all of this ending that's depressing. I know the universe began and I know that all of these physical laws had to exist exactly as they do to make this world we see, so the beginning doesn't have much of an effect on me. The thought of this not existing, though, is something that bothers me.

Order out of chaos doesn't worry me nearly as much as chaos out of order. If there's a mural on the ground and someone can show me how it came about from a jar of beads being thrown down and interacting so as to create the image, that's amazing and glorious and wonderful to me, even if there is no artist. But seeing something beautiful destroyed, whether it was created randomly or with purpose, is devastating to me.

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And for the third perspective, I personally find both ideas beautiful and inspiring. :)

The idea that my quarks, my atoms, my molecules, my cells are just temporary structures in a sea of entropy, is completely alluring to me. One of my favorite quotes in all of literature comes from Dune Messiah:

"The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not . . . yet, I occurred."

What I feel when I think of these things must be akin to what other people feel when they pray or meditate.

I can see the beauty in that and in my least egotistical moments I can embrace it, for myself. It's hard for me to feel comfortable with the idea of the universe itself eventually ending, though.

I have to say, this has been one of the most fascinating religious discussions I've ever had on the Internet. Thank you all!

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Originally posted by Zuul

It's hard for me to feel comfortable with the idea of the universe itself eventually ending, though.

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Sand art. Chalk art. A sunset after a brief storm. True love's first kiss. Are these things beautiful in spite of their transcience and impermeance? Or is the fact that they are so fleeting part of what makes them so beautiful?

Whether or not there is an afterlife, this mortal coil is itself a temporary construct. The bittersweet realisation that it will all be over adds a subtle yet definite undertone to the experience, mingling tragedy with serenity. So it is with us, so it is with the universe. Darkness may follow, but the light will always have shone.

(Also, I have no idea what I was channelling when I typed the above. Whatever. It sounds purdy.)

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I have to say, this has been one of the most fascinating religious discussions I've ever had on the Internet. Thank you all!

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Amen, sister!

:roll:

:LOL:

But then again, this universe may never end, but become an ever increasing ball of thinly spread matter, growing ever colder.

These physical laws we are feeling, may be nothing more than an infinitessimal possibility made reality. A perfect combination of an unknown set of possiblities that when occuring all at once allow us to exist.

Anything different, and nothing can exist, had existed, will exist.

We still don't know everything about ourselves, let alone this planet. How could we possibly state what we know about the universe is accurate?

In some ways, it helps to have faith in something that does understand what the universe is for, how it came to be, what it's purpose is.

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Originally posted by Marsilia

Zuul, babe, you just asked me to describe color to the blind.

For me, it starts with a truth: There is a god.

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Marsilia, I'm not trying to pick a fight or denigrate your beliefs in any way. But what proof do you have of the existence of a god of any kind? I'm asking this as a serious question, and I've been asking this question since I was about 10 years old. No one yet has been able to answer it. Perhaps you can.

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Originally posted by Clothahump

Marsilia, I'm not trying to pick a fight or denigrate your beliefs in any way. But what proof do you have of the existence of a god of any kind? I'm asking this as a serious question, and I've been asking this question since I was about 10 years old. No one yet has been able to answer it. Perhaps you can.

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Honestly, I'm not sure I can answer in a way that's going to satisfy you, considering some of the things you've said in other faith-related threads.

Proof of God is like proof of love. Do your parents love you, or just feel responsible for your well-being because your mother gestated you? Do your friends care about you, or are you just comfortably familiar to them? Does your spouse love you, or is s/he just possessive of the person s/he's fucking? Do your kids love you, or just depend on you for care?

To go bigger, is the very specific pattern of the universe that allows for our existence something cool that just happened, or is it the result of some consciousness? I look outside, and I see God. I look at the timing of me needing comfort and my dog needing a home and see invisible hands putting her in my path. I see the color of the sunset, or hear the waves on a beach, and I don't need to deny the science of how they happen, because God made those rules that we've been figuring out.

So, I can't point to a specific instance of "proof." For me, assuming there is no God would be like assuming that my parents are just nice to me because they feel guilty for not using birth control.

Honestly, Clothahump, the answer to your question is that there is no proof. None at all.

Nope, no proof whatsoever. The real question is - how much does that bother you/affect your beliefs? Proof doesn't really enter into it for me.

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Originally posted by Orual

Nope, no proof whatsoever. The real question is - how much does that bother you/affect your beliefs? Proof doesn't really enter into it for me.

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That's it. Atheists are prone to asking "where's the proof?" because that's what they need, and they can't fathom anyone not needing it. But it's never occurred to me to ask, because that's not what it's about for me. That's where the conversation always breaks down, because you're just coming at it from completely different perspectives, and there are no answers that will ever satisfy.

Atheists are about as religious as every other religious nut that I've ever met. They're actually more annoying than most of the religious people I know because they HAVE TO TELL YOU.

Just become a Buddhist or something. There's no real explanation for what's going on but there's a good bit of life lessons on how you can get through shit you encounter. Never forget, the great Buddha was a dead beat dad. Wisdom.

I'm not good at these debates obviously.

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Originally posted by hatesfreedom

I'm not good at these debates obviously.

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Well, you do bring a certain something to the table. :)

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Originally posted by Sarahfeena

Atheists are prone to asking "where's the proof?" because that's what they need, and they can't fathom anyone not needing it. But it's never occurred to me to ask, because that's not what it's about for me. That's where the conversation always breaks down, because you're just coming at it from completely different perspectives, and there are no answers that will ever satisfy.

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You're probably right, at least in general. Some of you have a little sliver of agnosticism hidden somewhere in there, too. ;)

On the advice of a friend, I watched the sun come up this morning. I didn't find any rock solid faith, but I did find a bit more comfort in the lack of knowing. Faith is beautiful, but embracing the mystery can be lovely as well.

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Originally posted by hatesfreedom

Atheists are about as religious as every other religious nut that I've ever met. They're actually more annoying than most of the religious people I know because they HAVE TO TELL YOU.

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Confirmation bias perhaps, the quiet and none-too-interested-in-religion atheists don't bother you with their bull. I hate the Dawkins adversarial atheism, I don't really get the point of it other than to be a smug prick.

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Originally posted by The Original An Gadaí

I was a believer til i wasn't. I was an adult when I decided it was all a load of cobblers. I don't know why I believed for so long, but I can't get back to that point.

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Originally posted by hatesfreedom

Atheists are...actually more annoying than most of the religious people I know because they HAVE TO TELL YOU.

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Originally posted by The Original An Gadaí

Confirmation bias perhaps, the quiet and none-too-interested-in-religion atheists don't bother you with their bull. I hate the Dawkins adversarial atheism, I don't really get the point of it other than to be a smug prick.

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See, I would think a "quiet and none-too-interested-in-religion" atheist wouldn't have come into a message board thread that asked a specific question of believers and espoused his belief that it's "all a load of cobblers."

I tend to get "witnessed" to more by atheists that want to sneer about how belief in "fairy tales" has made the world a terrible place than I do by theists who want to tell me about how I'm going to hell if I don't repent. Then, I politely remind them that I'm one of the believers they're talking about, and they start trying to dig themselves out of the hole. Is it a sample bias? Possibly. Unless religion comes up, we've got no way of knowing the beliefs of anyone we talk to, so the only people I know for sure are atheists are the ones who comment.