It works for me!
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Faith in Jesus works for me - it's exciting. I love the Bible and believe all of it - though there is mystery. There is mystery everywhere though, right? I am a incredibly happy believer in Jesus. I'm not a theologian, I just believe in Jesus.
I understand you can't make anybody believe in Jesus and the Bible, and I don't personally try to do that. But I highly recommend it from my experience with it. I can't get enough of the Bible or Jesus. I can't imagine trying to navigate through life without it at this point in my life.
I don't think Jesus or God is a thing you can prove to somebody. I heard about it a large percentage of my life and it didn't mean anything to me until a certain point - then that all changed.
So do you guys think that I'm fooling myself, not really happy, you don't believe me, or do you really think I can't be as happy or enlightened as you - are you evangelistic in that sense or what? What is the purpose of this site? Do you have something better to offer? If so, what is your gospel?
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Well, other than that Mrs Lincoln how did you like the play?
Do you have designs of directing me down your corridor in some way?
Ew.
I think I asked you before to kindly leave me out of your imagination.
).
It's difficult for me to respond to a request to describe my experience with that which I am convinced does not exist but I'll try to describe for you what it was like for me at various stages in my journey.
The first stage for me, as it was for many, was simple belief as a consequence of being raised by devout Christian parents. My family has an Anabaptist background and the significance of that to my story is that Anabaptists do not assume that the children of Christian parents are themselves Christians. Each individual is expected to choose whether or not to become a Christian when they are old enough to do so -- usually no earlier than the mid-teens.
However, when I was seven, I had the misfortune of hearing a hellfire preacher ranting about the End Times and the terrible fate waiting for those who were on the wrong side. It seems ludicrous to me now but, that night, I begged my parents to lead me in "the sinner's prayer" so that I could become a Christian. They were very reluctant and tried to talk me out of it -- from what life of sin does a seven-year-old need to be saved? I refused to give up, though, so my mom eventually did as I asked. I remember the experience as a euphoric one, which I suppose is understandable, considering what it was I'd been afraid of.
My ideas about God were quite unsophisticated at that point, of course. Every word in the Bible was true and I was somehow able to simultaneously believe that God was absolutely loving and that he was angry and dangerous. Stories like the noahic flood and Jonah and the whale were obviously extraordinary but I considered it no problem for a God who can do anything to do miracles that defied normal experience. I believed that miracles still occurred, even though I'd never seen one.
As I grew older, I periodically reconfirmed the commitment I'd made at seven. I guess it's necessary that, as a child's capacity for understanding and self-responsibility grows, commitments like that need to be revisited from time to time.
At fifteen, I was baptized. It seemed like the thing for a serious young Christian to do, to publicly declare my allegiance to Jesus. By then, I had begun to notice that some parts of the Bible seemed to contradict other parts but I had faith that God would not lie and that these apparent problems were a consequence of my inability to understand the deep mysteries of reality. After all, I was a puny human and God was God. God wasn't somewhere in the universe; the universe was somewhere in God. Because God was all-knowing, that which I didn't understand surely must make sense from God's perspective. Because God was Love, apparent injustices would certainly somehow be rectified in a system of balances too vast for mere humans to comprehend. I didn't need to know all about it, I just needed to trust. That was my faith.
I also had faith that if one examined all the evidence properly, the claims of the Bible would be supported by reason and by evidence. I considered reason and evidence to be important and surely God wouldn't give us the ability to think and then require us to abandon it. I guess I was sort of a latent skeptic at the same time that I was a young man of faith. (I think that learning to be comfortable with internal contradiction is necessary if one is to persist in religious belief.)
In my late teens, I became interested in creationism. I acquired a "creation science" text book and studied it, as well as some other material (don't ask me to provide titles or names of authors -- that was in the 1970s and such details have long since left me), and sometimes challenged my teachers in high school. Eventually, though, the intellectual dishonest of these "creation scientists" became apparent to me and I reluctantly acknowledged that they were not to be believed. After a time, I had to acknowledge that the first few chapters of Genesis could not possibly be literally true. That didn't shake my faith in God, though. It was just another of those problems that mere humans could not fully comprehend. I decided that God's purpose with Genesis was probably not to give us a science book but to teach us about His nature and human nature. (At that time, it didn't occur to me to wonder why God would choose to present His Word in such a troubling and confusing manner.)
As I grew older and continued to be interested in science and philosophy, I gradually had to drop various beliefs that I'd held since childhood (I'm not going to bore you or myself with a full chronology of that) but I still held to belief in a just and merciful God and an afterlife to which the faithful might aspire. I became more and more liberal in doctrine. I read some skeptical literature and also quite a bit of Christian apologetics.
Eventually, I was no longer sure whether or not I believed in God. I decided that I needed to know whether it was that I truly believed or that I had stopped believing but was unable to admit it even to myself. I spent a few years in introspection, struggling with that. At times, the struggle was agonizing; there were tears. I had a very strong emotional attachment to my beliefs but, intellectually, I was unable to justify them. Interestingly, I was finding it much more difficult to abandon the Jesus figure I'd embraced than to let go of belief in God, although I understood that if there is no God, then the Jesus story is of little importance.
One day, I finally made that step. I said to myself, "There is no God". The struggle was over and the sense of relief and elation was strangely similar to that which I'd experienced when I got "saved" at seven years old. One of the most stressful periods in my life was over and I was happier than I'd been in years.
Reality is the graveyard of the gods.
NoDeity,
Thanks, really well explained. I want to read it a couple more times and think about it.
Well Meph, that would be a first, considering how many times you have already heard stories like this.
However, if this is really progress on your part, I'm happy for you. Makes me feel like I didn't waste my time here after all.
NoDeity,
I know a family that went to a scare session like that and their kids were all baptized. The preacher who did that might have been fueled by guilt. People can go wrong in any position - a banker embezzles, a priest molests, a doctor becomes an addict, a fireman becomes an arsonist.
I have a very similar faith-destroyed type thing in my life. Tell me what you think of it if you want. I have pretty much lost all faith in doctors - to the point that I sew my own finger/hand up, and will die before getting major surgery - (I would go to one for a broken leg). And I honestly don't think they know what they claim to know. I think they for the most part make money on the body's own ability to heal itself. I think the fancy testing machines are money makers and snake oil on steriods. I think the cancer hype, trying to get people to hype each other and brag about "cancer survivors" is because they don't really know how to cure it, so they try to tap in to psych.
I would attribute this to the way doctors have been introduced to me. Right after I became a Christian I was struck with bipolar. My parents took me to a famous doctor. His counselor told me to get rid of my Bible - that was my problem he said. Then he mis-diagnosed me and gave me shock treatments along with the wrong RX.
I was then treated by an old Jewish doctor that seemed to want to make money off the insurance and would give a round of shock treatments but not rightly diagnose the problem or solve it. I was delivered from him in sort of a miraculous way. I had a vivid dream about him killing me and scared Hell out of him when I told him.
So, I walked into the library and the featured book was "Moodswing" (I know it was written by a pdoc so there's some lack of logic in my lack of faith in doctors). I was enabled to diagnose my own problem, then finally find a doctor that would give me lithium - and since that there has been no problem (over 35 years) and I am my own doctor, I take a ultra small amount of it (a lot less than the healthcare world thinks is necessary), which turns out to be what Kay Redfield Jameson does (see "An Unquiet Mind"
.
So here I am. I am conscious of the fact that there has to be such a thing as a good honest doctor whose purpose in life isn't just to make money. but I am ready to die rather than be re-wired by a committee. I see that I am in the same spot as you in a way, and I don't see a way to re-route this trip. I'm here, and went through hell getting here concerning false doctors, and another similar thing I see with my lack of faith and yours is the stories I hear re-enforce my position.
So, I think I grasp to some degree what you described. I don't have a re-route ready for you.
"Religion" was introduced out of order to me too. I went off to church camp and the spotlight was on being baptized, so I became a baptismal celebrity. It was much later I was reading the Bible and scared frantic by reading about my sin and the consequence. I was baptized that day. Then the bipolar hit. I felt like I was trying to glue myself together and running short on glue. It was slow coming together for me. I don't mean to parade that I have found exactly what I was searching for, but it's just as true as the hell part. It's been true for several years now, so I'm not just talking about short term.
It seems like I could look back and see that several good things weren't ideally introduced to me in my life. My parents didn't discuss sex for instance - it was that generation's approach. I don't think it was well introduced by fellow second graders.
I just want to say that I appreciate you explaining this. I don't think you were asking me for an answer, which I don't have anyway, though I wish I did. I enjoy trying to understand it and I think I do to some degree.
Just to get this out of the way, but you only mentioned your bipolar and the lithium in your first thread. Until now. In other words, it's time to quit pretending you're not the person who made the "what faith you" and "PALACE LIFE" threads. Just a little honesty, that's all I'm asking.
Well, this is refreshing. Not that you haven't made posts like this before, and I'm not sure what you mean by "re-routing", but it's nice that you no longer feel the need to threaten people.
That last bit is new. Interesting too, allthough I'm still not sure how it's relevant. Maybe you just wanted to show you're capable of having a conversation ? In that case, I hope it will soon become clear what the conversation is going to be about.
Well, that's good. I'm glad to hear that JCG and other's uncountable attempts to get through to you have born fruit, and you no longer feel the need to tell people who no longer believe that they "maybe didn't persevere enough, I don't know..".
You've learned something, Meph. Thank you for listening after all.
I've also known some good pastors, though. The pastor of the church I attended in my late teens was pretty good. I like to argue and he liked to argue so sometimes I would go visit him in his office and we'd have a good, long argument. He and I never did completely see eye-to-eye on certain topics but I appreciated the fact that it was okay to discuss such things.
It's not the bad evangelist that destroyed my faith. Rather, it was the cognitive dissonance between that which I was trying to believe and that which reason and evidence told me was most likely true.
Well, my life has been saved by surgery more than once, so I have a different perspective. About a year ago, I had minor surgery to remove precancerous growths that were found during a rather undignified examination that men of a certain age are advised to get (I'm 50). Cancer is real and I've seen friends die very painfully with it.
By the way, there is some pretty interesting evidence that vitamin D helps to prevent cancer, so I'm now taking 2000 IUs a day. That's supposed to be a safe amount and it's not expensive. 2000 IUs a day costs me about fifty or sixty bucks a year -- dirt cheap, really.
I have a regular doctor whom I trust but I don't accept everything he says without questioning. I have a certain level of trust in medical science but I wouldn't call it faith. Because I somewhat understand how scientific methods work and because I know of evidence that shows that science does work, I have some confidence in science. That confidence is based on reason and evidence and that is what distinguishes it from faith.
That sounds horrible. I don't blame you for being distrustful of the psych doctors.
I used to have a roommate who was diagnosed not only with bipolar but also paranoid schizophrenia. That was quite a few years ago. He's still bipolar but is stabilized on meds. He is no longer diagnosed schizophrenic and doesn't seem to hear the voices anymore. I still consider him to be a good friend so, although I haven't had those experiences myself, I have observed them up close.
My friend had the misfortune to be hit by the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia while attending a pentecostal-type Bible college. Instead of getting him medical attention, they tried to cast the demons out (which didn't work, of course).
If you can get the relief you need with minimal medication, that's excellent.
I appreciate your response. Thank you.
Reality is the graveyard of the gods.
Anonymouse,
I can't really say you have built up any trust with me. I have to wonder why you are now flattering me. Do you have designs of directing me down your corridor in some way? Up to this point all you have done is throw firebrands - I haven't seen you doing any of this listening you're blowing about. I haven't yet achieved any "discussion" with you. You've been a Shimei to me.
*sigh*
Looks like I was too optimistic once again.
Yes Meph, what is it ?
Trust ? I'm not your therapist. I'm just someone who's been trying to get some questions answered.
Calling it flattery is just flattering yourself. I just noticed that in your last few posts, you're no longer threatening or preaching at people, so I thought that deserved a little encouragement. I hope you'll keep it up.
Ew.
I think I asked you before to kindly leave me out of your imagination.
Actually, I've asked you questions. Really simple ones too. You really need to quit blaming me for not liking your own answers or lack thereof.
If I hadn't listened to you, I wouldn't have recognised you, Meph.
If you read back a few pages, you'll notice that's not for lack of trying on my part.
You really should stop comparing yourself to biblical characters.
Again, a simple question (dodged more times than I can count) : Have you been on this forum before, and did you make the threads "PALACE LIFE", and "What faith you" ?
Yes Meph, what is it ?
Trust ? I'm not your therapist. I'm just someone who's been trying to get some questions answered.
Calling it flattery is just flattering yourself.