Comments on: Understanding Doubt

By: Wayne

Wayne — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:36:46 +0000

@elderj
man – your experience is harrowing and enriching at the same time.
I relate.
I think “frightening” is def. the right word… I know Ehrman lost his faith over the theodicy issue – wondering how much of it was strictly intellectual and how much was… other things. I dunno what was happening in his life at the time.

By: elderj

elderj — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:36:29 +0000

I have been very close… extremely close, to losing my faith, to walking away altogether. It was a harrowing and frightening experience to think that I could indeed leave the Christian faith, though I don’t know if I could every be satisfied with atheism intellectually (and morally). I’m not really sure how I kept (or was kept) from walking away. It was in some ways a mysterious thing. It was not a rational experience, though to be sure, my mind and intellect were fully engaged. It was rather an experience rooted in a profoundly deep dissatisfaction and awareness of the meaninglessness of life. There was dissonance, to be sure, between what I knew and believed to be true about ultimate things (God, Christ, heaven, hell, judgment, grace, etc.) and the seeming reality of life around me.

So what did I learn? 1) Faith is sustained in community, though not dependent upon it. I made it through my near brush with apostasy entirely on my own; no one was with me in the battle. The community though was always there enacting the drama of emmanuel redeeming the world and us to himself every week.
2) Faith is a precarious thing; indeed a gift from God as scripture says.

By: Matt LeClair

Matt LeClair — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:05:04 +0000

Faith is a completely irrational experience from the get go, *but* it is influenced by our life experiences.

Example: A man is a God fearing man all his life — and then unexplicably his wife is killed in a freak gasoline fight accident (sorry, couldn’t resist). He doesn’t understand it…he doesn’t understand why God stole her from him…he doesn’t understand why God killed a good person when there’s so many bad people out there that deserve killing. He can’t rationalize the two situations (his faith in God, and his inability to rationalize the loss of his wife), so his faith in God is shattered, and he falls away.

I don’t think faith has to do with how we view ourselves, but rather the “real world” box that we try to wrap our faith into in order to make it make sense to us.

Christians do it with using archeological proof to help us “believe in” our faith.