In yesterday’s paper edition of the New York Times, the “letters” section highlights four responses to Julia Baird’s Sept. 25 op-ed,“Doubt as a sign of faith” (my post on here essay is here). Baird’s thesis, taking off from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent admission that sometimes he doubted God’s existence (but not Jesus’s), was that doubt is not a weakness of religious faith, but a strength. Remember Barid’s words?:
Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith becomes then a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief. But doubt is not just a roiling, or a vulnerability; it can also be a strength. Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs, and is not a detractor of belief but a crucial part of it.
As I noted, the problem is that there is no good way to resolve religous doubt except to either embrace it and become an atheist or, more usually, to convince yourself based on wish-thinking that you were right all along. It eludes me how going through a “darkness of the soul” somehow can strengthen you in your faith. That’s just not rational—not unless you find a gleam of evidence somewhere in the darkness. And if you return to faith after having your doubts, you are discarding intellectual honesty for emotional security.
So one would think that among the four letters to the NYT editor there might be at least one dissenter, one person who says that doubt is a strength of the intellect, but not a virtue of faith. But one would think wrong. All four letters agree with Baird, extolling the virtue of doubt.
Just three samples of the madness:
Julia Baird is wise to remind us that Christ himself experienced doubt and darkness on the cross when he cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” This cry has long confounded Christendom, but it should not because if Christ was to experience all that is human, he also had to experience spiritual doubt and darkness, a perplexing irony for he who said, “I am the light of the world.”
As for the archbishop of Canterbury: how poignantly real and human to admit and embrace his own doubt. Only a man who identifies with the whole of our humanity, its light and its shadow, could muster the humility and courage to reveal his own spiritual landscape.
How many of us would be so willing to lay bare our inner selves?
ROBERT WALDRON
Boston, Sept. 26, 2014The writer is the author of books about Christianity.
Courage? Is the Archbishop now hedging his public sermons or prayers: “Dear God (if you exist). . .” And if Christ had to experience “all that is human,” then he’d have to have sex, too, which I don’t think is mentioned in Scripture.
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Even the most faithful have doubts about their faith. If one does not, he or she is either a fool or a liar.
In my case it came as a crushing blow, even though I was a priest chaplain with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. I was always afraid that some bullet had my name on it. Once when we were in a firefight and the Marine point man was wounded, the medic shamed me into crawling up with him to help the man. In spite of fear, I followed him. When we were halfway there, a bullet blew the medic’s head off.
Covered with his blood, I lost my faith. How could a loving God do this to such a good man? I crawled to the Marine, lifted him onto my shoulders, stood up and carried him down. I had hoped that the enemy would kill me because I had nothing more to live for.
A priest without faith is like wine without grapes. I made it, and all thought I was courageous. Not so. I wanted to die. Later I came to belief again, but that is another story.
A situation can be shocking and so traumatic that we can go beyond doubt to atheism. But doubt there was, even for a priest.
PETER J. RIGA
Houston, Sept. 27, 2014
After that, he should have become an atheist for good. Finally:
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Julia Baird’s article reminds me of something that Dr. Leonard Kravitz, one of my rabbinical school professors at Hebrew Union College in New York, used to say to his students: “Certainty doesn’t make you correct. Certainty makes you certain.”
(Rabbi) STEVEN FOLBERG
Austin, Tex., Sept. 26, 2014
Dr. Kravitz was right. But belief in something for which there is no evidence makes you not admirable, but credulous.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the Times didn’t publish any letters saying that perhaps having doubts means that you’re believing in something that might not be true. After all, it’s not kosher to publicly criticize religion, even in the “letters” column of a liberal newspaper.
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I find Mr Riga’s one to be quite saddening, but only because of that horrifying anecdote about the traumatic event. What an awful thing to have to go through! I just wish he didn’t yoke them to his religious argument so. It feels almost cruelly manipulative to do so, and I doubt that was the intention.
Conscious or not, you can be sure the intent there was to buttress the idea that doubt is an ok response in certain situations, but full-on atheism is never warranted. He shared his story because it’s a sort of theodicean ne plus ultra, and he managed to salvage his faith.
A couple of the definitions of “faith” are: “Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence”, and “A strong and unshakeable belief in something, ESPECIALLY without proof or evidence” (I find it amusing that these are always right next to the definition, “A belief in a particular religious system”)
“Doubt”, on the other hand, is defined as, “To be uncertain about; consider questionable; HESITATE TO BELIEVE; to distrust”: as a verb, “To be uncertain about something”; as a noun, “A feeling of uncertainty about the truth, reality, or nature of something.”
My question: How can you “believe” something and, at the same time, “hesitate to believe” it? One of the definitions of “believe” being, “To acknowledge as real, or true”, how can one “believe” something, and yet “have uncertainty as to its truth”?
Answer is: you can’t- people who SAY they believe in God, yet have doubts about that belief don’t really “believe” in God at all: a TRUE believer has no doubt. What they’re actually saying is, “I TRULY believe, without proof, that for me to THINK that I believe that the God of the Bible is the true God and Jesus is his son will result in a “gain” for me in my life” (the professing of this belief publicly and the spreading of this “good news” are often considered to generate even more of a “gain”).
One of the most masterful mental gyrations that Christianity (and many other religions) have adopted in order to stave off any intellectual challenges to their memes is this matter of “faith”: a belief in something without proof or evidence (which is actually the weakest form of belief) is stood on its head and perversely turned into a virtue- the less evidence you have for your belief, and the more you are able to ignore conflicting evidence, the more virtuous you are!
Great comment.
Yes, the framing of faith as a virtue is one of the ways theists maintain their “belief” in a god.
And it should also be noted that their commitment to *thinking* that they believe in god is very, very strong. If it wasn’t, the world would be a much better place.
Given the constant conflation of God with goodness and love, belief in belief often translates into believing in the power of good in the face of evil and love in the face of hate.
Few theists ever really insist that there is *no* evidence. Instead, the evidence is only strong enough to convince those who want love and goodness to triumph.
“Cognitive bias” can operate in several different ways: the well-known version is where it limits or ignores the information coming in that conflicts with existent beliefs; another, lesser-noticed form is to grant more “value” to any information that agrees WITH those beliefs, so that a belief can be maintained with little or almost no evidence to back it up (which has the added allure of being really easy). Once again, though, you either believe something, or you don’t, and the reason a person adopts a belief is that they have ALREADY adopted the belief that to do so will result in some sort of personal “gain” in their life. To “avoid a loss” (burning in Hell for eternity) is also considered a “gain- in that sense, there is no “carrot and stick”; it’s an “all-carrot” system.
How one can conflate God with goodness and love after actually reading the Babble is beyond me: God tortures and butchers his way through it and supposedly plans to torture all sinners in eternal fire when it’s all said and done. He even SAYS that he “produces disaster” in Isaiah 45:7 (you’re not going to hear that verse in many sermons). What’s really insane is that, God being “all-knowing” (by the commonly-held Christian definition), God already knows the outcome of his creation and all of his beings’ personal struggles with sin; which souls will follow him and which will turn against him, rendering the whole muddled story a totally meaningless exercise.
“There is no ‘carrot and stick’.”
What about carrot sticks? Maybe Heaven really is Hell too? Maybe another mystery of faith?
Yes, that was the vibe I was getting as well. Riga’s experience of doubt and disillusionment was especially strong, which is presumably why it’s so heartwarming/noble that he still has his faith. The unfortunate effect is to turn a simple opening up of a bad experience into “Look at my wounds, and I’m still walking! I’m a true believer!”
I certainly feel compassion for the poor man after what he’s been through, but I find it borderline despicable that he (consciously or not) uses that likely emotional response in his argument for faith. It’s manipulative in the worst sense because it’s designed to bypass critical inquiry by making anyone critical of it look atrociously heartless. It also plays right into the stereotype of atheists simply being disgruntled believers who gave up trying, rather than being people with intellectual justifications for rejecting their belief.
Lastly, it sets up a “dumping basket” approach to stereotyping atheists and believers. Bad things happen in the world? You tend towards disillusionment and atheism. Wonderful things happen? You’re supposed to tend towards faith and religion. Even if it’s not that categorically or strongly stated, that’s the prejudice behind the arguments that bypass rational argumentation and go for emotional manipulation, and their way of framing it comes off as both manipulative and foolish. I’d be outraged if it wasn’t such a transparently, hopelessly stupid way to frame the issue.
Even in the UK, where most people either don’t care about religion or don’t see a problem with atheism, there’s still a mushy-headed view that so long as they have something to “believe in”, religion is OK. As if only by believing nonsense can you reach the higher experiences in life.
Mr. Riga seems to be a little confused. I could be wrong, but I don’t remember any Marines serving with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. And if Mr. Riga happened to be with the Marines for some reason, the person trying to save the wounded man would have been a Navy Corpsman, not a medic. I may be picking nits, but I remember a lot of details about Vietnam.
Mr. Riga seems to be a little confused. I could be wrong, but I don’t remember any Marines serving with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. And if Mr. Riga happened to be with the Marines for some reason, the person trying to save the wounded man would have been a Navy Corpsman, not a medic. I may be picking nits, but I remember a lot of details about Vietnam.
I guess if you really mean it, you get a double post…
Having faith does not imply doubt. Doubt and faith are two different mechanisms for applying significance to beliefs regarding their truth value.
“I doubt something is true, therefore I have faith that it is true.” This proposition is not correct. One can, however, legitimately have faith in something and simultaneously doubt, but the two are not the same. By definition faith justifies the absence of doubt.
Baird’s attempt to hoist confidence in faith by mixing it with doubt, is, at best, no better than doubting anything without having the courage to work hard to find out an answer, especially when there are answers available that are rationally more acceptable than anything organized religions have ever established.
I have always thought that the “why have you forsaken me?” confounds the idea of the Trinity. And now this. How could the Son of God doubt? Did he not know his mission was to die on the cross? How could he not, if he was the Son of God? And if he wasn’t, then whence the redemptive power of the sacrifice? To say that Jesus doubted is to create a major doubt.
The explanation is that the Synoptic gospels predate the theological conception of the Trinity.
This line is absent from the gospel of John, which is the gospel that pushes the divinity of Jesus the hardest. In fact, the gospel of John was probably written for precisely that reason.
Exactly. Sounds to me like Jesus was not in on the plan. Either it is all masturbation, i.e. god doing it to himself, in which case the redemption con is pure bullshit. Or, if you go with Jesus The Doubter, and somehow Jesus and god can be considered separate, then it would seem that god sacrificed Jesus without Jesus’s consent. Not very nice.
But, that kind of behavior does match well with the god of the bible.
The whole “My God, why have you forsaken me?” wasn’t doubting the existence of God – he’s asking him a direct question, so Jesus knows he’s there. I always took it as “Dad, you didn’t tell me it was going to be this bad. I’m pissed that you made me suffer like this.” I’m no theologian and I did think that horsemen were centaurs and Jesus was born and died as an adult all in one year, so my past biblical interpretations indicate that there is a high likelihood that I am wrong about this one but it just didn’t seem like a “faith” gripe.
Also, if Jesus had to experience all the human stuff, he should have to get gassy constipation. Why didn’t we hear about that in the NT?
Well, the whole premise is that God’s cunning plan was, um, to sacrifice himself to himself in order to be able to forgive everyone? Maybe halfway through the process it occurred to one of the 3 pieces of God that this plan just doesn’t really seem to make a whole lot of sense. Hence the self-doubt. But it would have been just too embarrassing to climb down from the cross and admit his mistake, so he bluffed his way through the rest of the crucifixion, hoping that the whole “mysterious ways” trope would obfuscate things so that he didn’t look like too much of an idiot. He figured he could later disappear quietly from the tomb and head back home without drawing too much more attention to a plan that was worthy of Baldrick. Unfortunately, a bunch of people noticed that the tomb was empty, and here we are 2000 years later.
If only Blackadder had tackled the era of Christ!
I guess they thought Life of Brian had already done it, but Hugh Laurie as a Bertie Wooster/Prince George Christ, with Judas/Jeeves Blackadder continually getting him out of amusing scrapes with maiden aunts that lead to the bible stories, would have worked splendidly.
Hugh’s Jeebus would not even be able to put on his loincloth properly…
Little known fact: it wasn’t a whip Jesus used to drive the money-lenders out of the temple. Turns out that’s a mistranslation. As I’m sure a classics scholar like yourself is aware, the Greek for “whip” and “horrible flatulence” is the same.
(Yes, yes I did pull this “out of my ass”. 😀 )
More trumped up hermeneutics!
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You take that back, or you’ll see just what kind of stink I can raise!
Ha ha!
All of these people seem to use the word “essential” when they really mean “unavoidable.”
Synonyms for today: “theist” and “spin doctor”.
Well, they’re always synonyms. I meant that in a “your daily synonyms” sense.
I once heard some radio preacher in California declare that God practices and “economy” of miracles. That’s why there are not more of them. If there were more miracles there would be less inclination to have faith, which is essential to get on God’s good side. Ignorance is bliss according to this view, I guess.
Having doubts and plowing on ahead regardless almost seems like some sort of cognitive failure. Isn’t it somewhat like tackling a difficult project and failing to take into account any feedback on your progress?
“All that is human”?
Surely, he must have put child birth on his punchlist?
Meanwhile, the Daily Fail is reporting that Pope Francis believes in angels: http://dailym.ai/1mVE0Vt
Alas, my guardian angel seems to be pretty poor at making decisions.
German has two words: “Zweifel” — meaning doubt, and belonging to critical thinking and checking of evidence; and the related “verzweifelt” — meaning to doubt oneself or ones chances, and referring to the emotional state of desperation. hopelessness, etc.
Anyone arguing that faith is based on doubt is conflating these two meanings, and would be prevented from doing it in German by the clarity of the language.
Even faith has two words: “Glaube” for religious faith, and “Vertrauen” for having faith in someone.
(P.S. None of this Germanic clarity explains why the German Tax Office is currently trying to trick me into paying the “church tax”.)
Oh German. It is always so clear. My favourite word is still Krankenwagen.
I always liked Krankenschwester…
And when I think of it, I really really like it that the language prevents some ideas from even being expressed, if they are too stupid.
If it did allow that we might really have been in trouble given some of the stupid ideas they have come up with
Some ideas are so stupid they have their own safety catch.
Like “First we get rid of all the Jews… Then we build an atomic bomb. We gather the best physicists and…”
Ooooh that’s good too!
Unless you’re trying to distinguish between “safety” and “security” — both are “Sicherheit”.
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Yep, and certainty as well… But if you’re safe and certain and secure, then you probably don’t need to make any distinctions anyway.
Nevertheless, the Frau from a well-known luxury car manufacturer speaking at our conference in Germany switched to English to make the point she wanted to make!
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Dammit, I don’t have any riposte to that. Well I tried my best at least.
http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/faith
I guess any decent theologian could also explain how:
Being not-pregnant is part of being pregnant, being dishonest is part of being honest, being female is part of being male….
lolz.
If doubt is an essential part of faith, why is disbelief the only unforgivable sin?
BOOM!
All these NYT readers who fool themselves that it’s ok to doubt should realize that you can’t be a half-believer, just like you can’t be a half-gangster. 🙂
If you dare to disbelieve, you’re going straight to hell, according to the “good” book.
Because you failed the Doubt Test. Your rational reservations aren’t putting the belief on trial; they’re putting your character on trial.
Can you rationalize them away, pretend they are attacks on values, use them to become more certain, or carry them as battle wounds and handicaps to make your continued belief even more impressive? Then you pass.
Approach religious beliefs like any other claims of fact — you lose. Never color outside the lines.
“Your rational reservations aren’t putting the belief on trial; they’re putting your character on trial.”
And so the ‘religious mantra’ goes, but in actuality, a reasoned doubt and disbelief in god has nothing to do with your character, but with objective assessment of facts about reality.
Agree — though I also think that a desire to seek truth through honest methods — an objective assessment of facts and reality — says something about the honesty of a person’s character.
It’s not that people of faith intend to be dishonest; they muddle up facts and values and then proceed as usual.
People who insist that atheists are unhappy do not realize how much wasted energy, intellectual stagnation, and emotional suffering afflict the religious person who is trapped on the doubt/faith seesaw. Yet the religious apologists insist that atheists have lost something valuable, rather than escaping from a miserable trap.
It is so cliche. I categorize it as yet another of what Sastra terms “immunization strategies.” Although I might change that to “tactic” instead.
Apologists’ prediliction for this claim has more, I think, to do with projection of their own angst and need to justify their beliefs than it does with actual observation of miserable atheists.
I originally got the term “immunizing strategy” out of Stephen Law’s blog and book Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked Into an Intellectual Black Hole. They’re tactics which are adopted in order to protect bad ideas from refutation. I’ve found it a very useful concept — particularly when trying to get to the hub of an actual claim. You have to peel away the additional baggage to get to what they’re really saying.
It seems to me that having “faith” in God’s existence is not actually intrinsic to religion: only having faith that God is the proper authority or ultimate meaning is. It’s perfectly possible to imagine a God which is both obviously and clearly there with no logical contradiction. So faith THAT God exists is mixed up with faith IN God’s wisdom, importance, love, and honesty. Trust the trustworthy. That’s why this nonsense about doubt being a necessary part of faith is such a popular trope.
After all, if your love, trust, or virtues are never tested then they weaken. Courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s the mastery over it. But fact claims shouldn’t be treated as if they were commitments. Otherwise, you’re not being steadfast and true: you’re just being dogmatic and pig-headed.
Law’s own list of immunizing strategies (and rhetorical trickery) is the following:
1.)Playing the Mystery Card
2.)”But It Fits!” and the Blunderbuss
3.) Going Nuclear
4.) Moving the Semantic Goalposts
5.) “I Just Know!”
6.) Pseudoprofundity
7.) Piling Up the Anecdotes
8.) Pressing Your Buttons
How could atheists EVER be unhappy when there are so many religious beliefs and pronouncements to constantly entertain us?
I think only people who are in love with the idea of faith talk about doubts in this way. This kind of “doubt” is not a sudden desire to seek out better ideas based on their merits. It’s all about emotion, it’s all about the dramatic arc. Continual unwavering faith is just emotionally unsatisfying. There is no tension. Just like any romantic novel or soap opera, the “doubt” provides the emotional tension as the story builds, a tension that is ultimately resolved at the end of the story by the reaffirmation of faith.
Very well put. Religion weaves your life into an important cosmic narrative.
Why was the universe created? It was created so that God’s love could be maximally expressed. How? By allowing beings created in His image to love Him of their own free choice — and that means YOU!!!
It’s dramatic in the familiar social sense of relationships. The cosmos then is a love affair in progress. Invoking “tension” as a necessary plot device seems spot on.
‘Only a man who identifies with the whole of our humanity, its light and its shadow, could muster the humility and courage to reveal his own spiritual landscape.
How many of us would be so willing to lay bare our inner selves?’
Hurl!
hmmm, two gospesl has Jesus having any doubts. Luke has no such thing and JC sure he’ll be in heaven in short order and John has JC quite damn sure of himself.
Faith is not involved with doubt. Hope might be. That’s why they are separate words.
And Riga is one more pathetic man who sees the evidence of no gods but is too selfish to admit that there are none. He will lie to himself no matter what happens so he can pretend he is special to an imaginary being.
C’mon NYT, wake up!
Someone with a relationship with The Times should write their Letters Editor and ask whether or not there were letters submitted on the other side of this issue.
I also find it odd that all the writers admitted to having doubts. I know many believers who say that they KNOW that their faith is true and I’m surprised that no-one like that wrote to the paper.
I can personally attest to being much happier since abandoning a belief in a god.
Doubt is your rational mind trying to assert itself. In any situation other than religious belief, believers rely on doubt to help them make good decisions, then ignore that tried and true process for deciding on the existence of a supernatural being. It doesn’t make sense.
I’ve heard people equate knowing God’s love with knowing your partner, for example, loves you. But it’s obviously not the same; with a partner, you have evidence of past actions and behaviours to go on, among other things.
I think it’s more about things like fitting in and thinking if so many billions think it’s right, it must be right.
“But it’s obviously not the same”
It would equate perfectly if your partner were also imaginary…
I’ve been given the same analogy. Once someone actually used the scene in Sagan’s Contact where the Christian asks the atheist main character “Did you love your father?” and when she answers “yes” he responds “prove it.” Whoa, what a gotcha. Yeah, believing in God is just like that.
Religion is the art form of category error. Believing in God is not like believing you love your father: it’s like believing that you have a father. If someone argued that you didn’t then they’d have to make some rational argument to that effect: your father is dead; your father is an hallucination; you’re adopted; you’re a life form created in a test tube out of chemicals — something. And now there’s evidence and reason and claim and counter-claim and probabilities to deal with on an objective and inter-subjective basis.
It’s not all “you just can’t know what it feels like to feel what I’m feeling.”
That exchange in Contact is inane even without the category error. There would be substantial objective evidence that I loved my father. There are witnesses to the affection I showed him; there are birthday cards proclaiming my affection for him; etc., etc. Although, as with any proposition, people could certainly debate the SUFFICIENCY of the evidence, I think most rational people familiar with me and my father would readily answer “Yes” if asked whether I loved my father. The example in Contact seems to be just another manifestation of the absurd belief by religious folk that since it’s generally impossible to prove the absolute truth of any proposition outside of mathematics, all assertions of a truth claim are equally credible.
Good point. And after all, we often DO question whether someone really loves someone else or not. If you firmly believe you love your wife but regularly belittle and abuse her when she fails to live up to your expectations, then there’s a legitimate argument to be made that no, you don’t really understand your emotional state better than anyone else can.
“[T]he problem is that there is no good way to resolve religous doubt except to either embrace it and become an atheist or, more usually, to convince yourself based on wish-thinking that you were right all along.” J. Coyne
In one sense doubt is opposed to belief, and in another sense it is opposed to certainty.
Someone who says “I believe that p but I doubt that p” behaves inconsistently, but someone who says “I believe that p but I am not (100%) certain that p” does not.
When theists say that doubt is essential to faith, they cannot mean to say that unbelief is essential to faith (given that faith entails belief), but only that uncertainty is essential to faith. If that’s the case, then theists must be so honest and modest as to abstain from claims to knowledge regarding their religious beliefs. Statements such as “I know that God exists” are then taboo. However, of course, if faith entails belief plus certainty by definition, then it is self-contradictory to say that uncertainty is essential to faith.
Note that the kind of certainty we’re talking about here is psychological or subjective certainty (“I am/We are certain that p”) rather than epistemological or objective certainty (“It is certain that p”). Subjective certainty is independent of objective certainty.
Bottom line, there is no wrong way to believe in God. If you believe in God despite multiple and strong rational doubts — good for you. If you know God as well as you know yourself and cannot even imagine the possibility of being wrong — good for you, too.
If the NYT were to publish an author’s breathless paeon to the peace and joy they have in their absolute certainty of knowing God, you’d probably see the same dreary letters of praise for the writer’s “bravery.” The only thing which might draw down some public ire is if either believer says that the other kind of believer is doing it “wrong.”
>Julia Baird is wise to remind us that Christ himself experienced doubt and darkness on the cross when he cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” This cry has long confounded Christendom
Christians appear to be a really confused bunch, don’t they? Jesus clearly isn’t doubting the existence of God here, after all he addresses his words to – wait for it – God (My God, why have you…). He just can’t understand why his sky daddy did what he did.
There is a special kind of religous doubt that never leads away from faith, unlike real doubt that you would think might do so. Claims to be plagued by doubts tend to just be a way of proclaiming the believer as nobly tortured.
Yes, it’s part of the script. When fear of “losing your faith” becomes concern about “changing your mind” you’re no longer playing the game.
Well…he did give it the ol’ college try with Thomas, but, predictably, didn’t quite get the hang of it. But what do you expect from alien zombie necromancers? On what basis are they supposed to prefer this hole or appendage to that one?
b&
Example one: a person named Jesus, a Jew who may or may not have existed, is said by much later narrative accounts to have been crucified by the Romans. While allegedly on the cross and in terrible mental and physical anguish, he is said to have said, ‘why has thou forsaken me?’ Not ‘Christ’ (i.e., the Messiah)but a possibly historical figure, the evidence for whom is dubious. Still, a good enough story about a man but no better or more affecting than human tragedies played out every single day of our existence. Jesus, if he existed, was a member of Homo sapiens. His suffering was human.
Personally, I hate the Doubt but love the Doubter.
Doubt is so you can have have make-up sex with Jesus.
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Weird. No clue why mine came through like that…I thought I had laid out a tic-tac-toe board….
b&
Well, I guessed that’s what it was meant to be.
But … the only winning move is not to play.
So I didn’t.
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Curiously enough, not praying is every bit as essential to winning….
b&
Yep, the only winning move is not to pray.
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Rather, if you want to win, pick your prey carefully.
b&
Prey on prey that prays, not prey that fights back.
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Lettuce prey!
b&
Why? Have you lost your head?
Yes — bunches of thymes!
b&
Don’t worry, it always seems to turnip somewhere.
Sage observation.
b&
Well, chris does know his onions.
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Thanks. I tend to take a layered approach and try to really get to the core of the issue.
Do your eyes tear up?
Of course, any decent person taking this approach artichoke up.
Groooooaaaaaaannnnnn:-)
As long as you don’t take any leaks, we’ll be fine.
b&
WOPR is that you?
You would be MAD to think so …
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K
🐾🐾that’s final🐾🐾
Che pasa? ( too lazy to enable the Spanish keyboard)
Notice that nobody doubts the existence of The Bible. We see it for sale in book shops; we stayed in hotels with a copy in the drawer; many of us have read it.
But there’s a huge debate over the existence of God. Which is really a debate over whether the stories in the Bible are fundamentally different than all the other myths written down by the ancients. If the stories about God were more than just stories, it wouldn’t take any more work to prove God’s existence than proving the existence of the Bible.
I only remember religious doubt from adolescence, but I recall it as being thoroughly corrosive. I suspect that many of the people who claim that doubt is something other than psychologically damaging are actually just believers in belief. They aren’t troubled because they let go of actual belief a long time ago. A true believer would regard doubt as sinful, not something to be celebrated.
Bingo, Jerry. A perfect distillation of the argument in one sentence. Unfortunately, attempting to get religious people to realize –let alone admit to– this is incredibly frustrating. They look at you as if you’ve asked them to pour fish guts in their socks. Even getting them to entertain the notion is like herding invisible cats.
If Riga’s story is true, I don’t care if he’s Xtian or not: I admire him. That said, it seems odd that believers think doubt is an essential/virtuous part of faith when, any time scientists change their minds about something or produce a new explanation, this is leapt upon by believers as a failing.
Doubt is a characteristic of rational thinking, surely, not of faith. Or is this a new manifestation of cargo-cultism from the faithful?
My guess is that it’s probably gained some recent credibility and value because of its superficial similarity to “remaining true to your heart.” The head is a deceiver.
When everything is pushing you in a direction which doesn’t feel right to you, believe in yourself. Don’t give up. Trust your instincts. You know best. Follow your own dream. And so forth and so on. Blah blah blah.
What makes for a nice little pep talk when someone is contemplating personal life choices is now being applied to the “choice” to be a person of faith. The doubt isn’t EVER supposed to be coming from their hearts, is it? It’s the corruption of the material world trying to tamp down their hope.
The greater the enemy, the greater the victory. Reason is such a bully. That one is old.
Saying that doubt is essential to faith is like saying that adultery is essential to marriage.
They’d probably say it’s more like temptation being essential to fidelity. If there’s no interest and no opportunities, then it’s not the practice of virtue. Adam gets no credit for never stepping out on Eve with another woman.
Is there any difference between the two from a Christian’s point of view? Isn’t thinking about adultery already a sin?
Matthew 5:28: “But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” I remember Pope John Paul II said that this even applied to a man looking at his own wife.
But… JP2 had a wife? Didn’t know that.
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Absurd. Can these people name even one other thing for which we experience darkness or doubt, but we know it exists? Sure, a person may doubt the love of a significant other, for example, but the darkness wouldn’t involve doubting the existence of the person.
I think the claim that “doubt is essential to faith” is often just a catchphrase used by believers to imply that their faith is rational – that they continue to maintain their faith after analyzing and rejecting the evidence in opposition to their beliefs.
“Certainty doesn’t make you correct. Certainty makes you certain.”
I like the way Terry Prachett put it in Monstrous Regiment…
“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.”
A lot of people may claim doubt as a sign of humility though they may never pursue their doubt with an an objective search for the evidence that would resolve their doubt on way or the other. They may say that they put their faith in those that know more then they do thus reinforcing that they are being humble Christian follower and one of the humble “sheople”.
This expression of doubt by the Archbishop is akin to a sneezing fit bought on by whatever, fear of the unknown? having a bad day? and not a legitimate attempt at rationality or reason.
The apologist drivel however heart felt is an attempt to wipe his nose after the fact.
There is nothing here for reason or rationality.