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I'm looking forward to sharing a table with you one day. I have faith that I am loved without condition. And I have no evidence to back that up. At times, I have evidence to the contrary. Why do I still believe it? It beats the alternative. And it's true. I just know it.

I have a faith that seeks assurance above certainty.
I have a faith that values questions over answers.
I have a faith that finds meaning in the Biblical narrative.
I have a faith that values love in action above all else.

Welcome back, preacher-man.

I too hope that someday we could have that conversation. I admire your stubborn faith. Mine today is more "I wish I had the faith I had..." But on the other hand, I'm not sure that was real faith. I think Jesus is the way but I'm not so sure he's the way in the way so many of his followers have made it out to be.

anyhoo...

The only flaw in your lovely imagery is that there was no mention of the cold beers on that table under the stars!

notarev

Good question Gordon. It reminds me of my journey.

I used to be the scared shitless guy. I read a LOT of apoligetics, I had "Mere Christianity" just about memorized, I did all of this because I HAD to be sure that what I believed was true. I was terrified that what I believed might be wrong. I am sad to say I was the kind of person who thought people who believed oherwise where idiots, I had to think that, because of my own insecurity.

Than over time I started to grow out of that. I read alot of different writers who kind of changed my opinion, and I entered into the "It doesnt matter if my beliefs are true or not because I have felt God in my own life, so its true to me" phase. My faith became based on emotion. The feeling of God through my emotions. In this phase I had a few experiences (at least three) that I would call "mystical."

Now I am passed even that. I realize that my faith cannot be rooted in intellect or emotion, because both of those may betray me, and I might not have them forever, they both change day to day.

Now I like to think that my faith is rooted in something deeper still that I cannot explain. Fuck emotions, fuck intellect too. Those are good things, but Im'a go right on livin' no matter what happens to them.

love,
Big Fan.

As a quibble, believing in Buddha is only really important to Pure Land Buddhists, who engage in prayer for the Buddha to intercede from the Pure Land. Philosophically speaking, form the standard Buddhist perspective, if The Buddha never existed, it wouldn't change the results. If Mohamed or Jesus never really existed, it would change the meaning of the religion.

For me, as an atheist, I don't think "only idiots believe in god". I just don't believe in anything supernatural. I don't think people who accept that as true are idiots, I think they just want things they can't prove to be true, and act as if they were. I might well eb wrong. There might be supernatural things. I've just seen lots of charlatans, and out of the proposed contradictory supernatural systems (Christianity, Wicca, Shintoism, etc...) there's no real reason to pick one over the other other than aesthetic appeal.

I guess in that sense, you could claim that atheism has aesthetic appeal to me, but I'm being honest in that I chose it for that reason, and it holds up well to replicable testing.

I like mythic realities. I really really like them. I read fantasy based on them incessantly. I read books of mythology and religious study. I love it so much that I'm starting my own publishing company. But a myth created by a friend is beautifully and new, and *all* old myths are equally beautiful to me, so why choose one over another for which is more attractive?

I'm like that with cuisine too, I guess. It's all yummy. I don't want to say that I like Chinese food better than Mexican food.

And as the moment ebbs, and the chuckle has passed, and we're pondering the stars, I say:

You're on deadline too, aren't you.

When we're out talking under the stars... Can I be the one in the pink shoes?

I'd like to think I have -that- kind of faith: Pink-shoe faith.

Beautiful words, brother.

One of my best memories of SXSW is of eating those crummy convention center tacos with you and talking about theology. God willing, I look forward to doing it again one of these days. Maybe this time with better tacos. :-)

***
"Why write unless you praise the sacred places?" -- Richard Howard

That second paragraph after the "Or."? That's me. I don't know about the "always" -- I came to my version of atheism after thought and study, so I can't honestly say I've felt that way my whole life, but pretty much all of my adult life, yeah.

I remember once I was reading a Usenet newsgroup and someone said something about reincarnation, and I caught myself thinking, "Yeah, that would be cool, too bad it's not true," and I realized that I really didn't believe in an afterlife. Up till then I'd had an intellectual disbelief, that was when it became clear to me that it was true at an emotional level also.

I'd like to be your third, more romantic alternative, but I'm too lazy to have a really rigorous epistomology.

Somewhere between desperate and stubborn, but really leaning towards stubborn. Life throws curves one doesn't expect when you think prayer will "work" and it didn't. And doing the "right thing" will save the day...and it doesn't. But something inside me won't let go. I've loved Him for too long. I can't let Him go.

Sometimes, I find myself standing beneath a cold clear winter sky, far from city lights. I see that there are far more stars visible than I remembered during the cloudy months of autumn. And I realize that the universe is unimaginably big. There are a lot of mysteries that I will never understand. My faith is based on some mixture of fear and awe.

Fear of death, and fear of homelessness drive me to seek meaning for this life and a place within the grand scheme of things. If it were not for my sense of awe, I would be made totally wretched by my fear. With this sense of awe comes the knowlege that I will never have all the answers that my fears desire, but the mysteries are good and meaningful.

Am I known by the Unknowable? It would be nice to believe that this is true. Sometimes, I believe. Sometimes, I simply don't know.

I choose to practice a religion because it challenges me to become a better human being. And yet, I sometimes, I think I was a more honest human being before I joined a church and thus implied an agreement with all of its teachings.

God, I miss the freaks, lesbians, and weirdos, I used to hang out with when I was single and agnostic. Would it make sense for me to pray to Jesus for more of them to come back into my life? Not with the goal of converting them to something, just loving them for who they are. Actually, it probably would make sense since I think that's who Jesus spent a lot of his time with too.

Carol Kelly... Mom to sheep and dogs.

Gordon,

I'm curious as to what may have inspired this piece. You have made it very clear over the years that you basically take people how you find them no matter what. The story of George is a good example.

Just wondering aloud as a confused agnostic. I second the motion that we gaze at the stars with a couple of beers! ;-)

As a geologist, I recognize that much of my science is faith based. I can do a really good job of inferring what conditions were like in the past, but I will never know exactly what happened.

Basically, we learn as much as we can and then fill in the gaps as best we can. Any scientist that doesn't recognize that faith is involved, is just deluding him/her self. We just cannot know everything.

From there, I get just a little whacky. I think there are things that we cannot perceive because it doesn't make sense for us to perceive them. As a result, I think things like time travel are possible. Hopefully, someday I can tell you my limpet story.

Anyway thanks for the post. I always enjoy reading them.

I've been struggling with faith for a long time and it's changed from the comfortable agnostic "there's just no way to know anything" to a paranoid and frightened Christian "God might send me to hell so I'd better get some crap together and do my best to believe something"

Your blog has really been a comfort to me while I'm going through this time. Thanks so much.

I guess I'm headed in the "dreamy and courageous scientist" direction. I wish I weren't, but I can't seem to help it. I want very badly for there to be a God who loves me, but it just seems like the evidence isn't there. I hope that if there is a God, my desire to believe and my love for other people will be enough, because that's all I have to offer.

i prayed for a change. and he started talking to me again. no, not god, but someone who means as much to me. it restored my faith. now i have something to hold onto and believe in.

Hello, PreacherMan:
I have stubborn faith, like yours. But lately God and I have talked and I have found something odd to be true of me:
I pity Him.
But He pities me as well, so I guess we're even.

More at my campsite as it fleshes itself out in my head.

MMM

Oh.
And you would sit across from MMMe with a big plate of homemade mac and cheese with greens. Reason to believe, indeed. ;)

MMM

I have faith because I have found that it enriches my life. For a long time I didn't really believe in God; it wasn't that I was an athiest, but rather that it just didn't matter. Then something happened that got just enough of my attention to say "well, what if?". Being an engineering type, I hypothesized the existence of God and -- purely as an experiment, you understand -- tried to do what I understood him to want, even though of course we can never know. You know what? The more I tried the more resonances I found.

I would enjoy sharing a table, or a stargaze, with you.

Monica (http://cellio.livejournal.com)

I was raised believing in an all knowing, all powerful God (Baptist raised, btw) - but living in an imperfect world was too much of a challenge for me to wrap my head around all knowing, all powerful, AND loving.

If a human being had that kind of power and ability to stop some of the awful atrocities that occur in our world, and didn't, he would be called a coward at best. For a deity, if not a coward, the very least you can ascribe to Him is being indifferent. No amount of mental gymnastics or emotional hand-wringing can get around that for me.

That's the very cut-down, kernel sized core of my dilemma. You can try and throw John 3:16 at me (to which I would say, "Live in the world a little bit, it obviously wasn't enough.") or free will (to which I would say, "Screw free will, the tree of knowledge was an experiment that was doomed to failure from the very start") but that's where I am.

I guess if you wanted to put me in a box, I would be somewhere at a crossroads between mild agnosticism and model agnosticism with a dose of apathetic agnosticism thrown in - with a lot of my ethical views coming from a humanistic stance (minus all the secular imperatives that have crept into it). I would like to be a theist, or even an agnostic theist, but can't quite get there. All enough to produce quite a lot of hand-wringing of my own.

Irrespective of all this, I've been an early member, one of the longest members, and fairly involved in a missional community (or emerging church movement, if you prefer) in my area. What can I say, I have some pretty good friends.

I would like to have faith, sometimes I yearn for it, but there is so much about the religion that I was raised in that I find either unbelievable (virgin birth, a deity that is intently concerned about how humans but not other beings use their genitalia) or revolting (subjugation of women, condemnation of homosexuals and of people who don't share same world view as believers) that I can't. And how could such a being that cares about every sparrow permit all the evil that flourishes around us, from Dachau to Darfur to the extinction of species?

So while I totally respect your position of choosing faith, of choosing to believe and to act as if what you believe is true, even when you aren't sure some (or most?) of the time if what you believe is true, I don't find that option open to me. I do envy you often, though.

But I enjoy the stories and the thoughts, and I share some of the dreams.

Peace,
An old online friend who likes his privacy.

Hello fellow seekers,
It's Sunday morning and this is church for me today. Yes, I'm that old short guy sitting in the back with my cane by my side. Hi!
Nice friendly looking group we have today.After reading the essay (thanks) and the comments (thanks) It's just like being back in Steve Brown's bible study. Ten great years of hearing the practical aspects of letting our faith grow. And it does if we admit we need a leader with feet on the ground who prays to the Father before starting the next part of the journey.
May we all continue to be led, in God's love..

Weewilly

I was wishing I could sit under the stars with you and chat like that... and then I thought, Do you (RLP) even have time to read all these responses to your writings? Is there enough of you to go around? You have another flock here online, and I'm just one of the many who read you and are moved.

But you know what? There would be a bunch of us out on that hillside under the stars. And maybe I can't talk to you. Maybe you're too busy, with everyone wanting to hear from you and pour their thoughts on you. But there'd be a bunch of us. And I'm betting there'd be little clusters of us, sitting and sharing and probing the mysteries of life and the universe. Kicking back, and realizing we are a community. In the summer, under the stars. :)

One more possibility, Gordon. What about those few of us who do not know how to believe? It's as if it's a skill I've not been able to learn, like tightrope walking.

Turns out, as a man with Asperger's syndrome, there are quite a few things I am unable to do, and others I am able to do that others cannot.

Good to read you. Hope we get to meet again.

Chuck Nolan

I share many of the perspectives shared on this board. Thank you all for your insights (and thank you Gordon for the post that set the tone for the conversation).

I am an African-American, 28-year old seminary student and the idea of a personal, loving, intervening, prayer-answering, self-revealing God has never seemed farther for me than it is right now. It is becoming less and less-convincing for me.

Over the past few years, Christianity (as is often preached) has become almost impossible for me to believe. I can understand why the Gospel (as commonly preached) is so hard to believe in nowadays. Here, I paraphrase the 19th century European historian/philosopher Renan who once noted the irony that “the miracles that originally inspired belief in the gospel may eventually be the same things that keep later generations from believing.”

Likewise, it’s hard for me to take seriously the metaphysical and supernatural occurrences that seem to be so prevalent in the scriptures of the global religions yet so absent in life as we often experience it.

I would like to follow the simple, essential teachings of the human being known as Jesus of Nazareth, but not at the cost of believing incredible ideas and embracing the implications of a belief that condemns most of the earth’s inhabitants. I also don’t want a faith that is frightened, arrogant, or desperate. If anything, I am desperate for the truth and I try to be open to the many sources that it may come from (be it through science, archeology, experience, or the wisdom of another religious and ethical tradition). This makes me a poor evangelist, but I hope it makes me a better human.

For me, a faith that’s worth anything needs to be in dialogue with the empirical sciences and the complex (and often harsh) realities of human existence such as genocides, stray bullets, body counts, etc.

How can we continue to pontificate and debate over metaphysical notions and otherworldly realms (that we aren’t sure even exist) while the suffering of our fellow humans (who we know exist!) takes place right outside our windows?

I appreciate honest, humble and helpful people and have found such people in a wide variety of religious traditions. However, I have less patience for those who insist on following their scriptural authorities despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I understand their anxiety, but I no longer share it.

It seems to me that much of the world’s religious history is a testament to the power of the human imagination and the human’s need for meaning. The whole enterprise of belief seems to be so rooted in so much speculation that I find it difficult to imagine evangelizing to others with the claim that one’s religious tradition possesses the only, true way to understand reality.

Instead of debating and speculating about otherworldly realms, I think we should realize how interconnected all of our lives are on this earth and work to help and serve the real people we see everyday. John Lennon’s classic song, “Imagine” makes more sense to me now than ever before.

I believe that all of us believe- or disbelieve- based on those things we want to be true.

- Geno

For some reason, when I posted my last comment, I could only post as an anonymous user.

My comment began with: "It is a great tragedy that so many have lost their faith because they find the doctrines of Christianity unbelievable not recognising that doctrines such as the virgin birth are not taught in the New Testament..."

So, here we go again...

vynette

welcome back, kotter.

-soupablog paul

you get a LOT of comments...man...i didn't read all of them.
just wanted to say - i don't know what "type" of faith i have...i might be the scared type, because thinking about defining my faith is scary. but i appreciate you putting this out there...as always.
what i found most interesting - that you compared people reading your writing to seeing you naked. like when you write, you bare it all. i admire that...very brave. maybe that is why so many people keep their thoughts locked away inside their heads...too scared of what someone might think to let them out. i'm that way a lot. but your writing really encourages me to go for it. to put it out there.
one last thing...i got your book with the origami paper and ginkgo leaf in it. thanks. :)

and what are the pink shoes for? were you just testing to see if someone would notice?

Thank you for all these wonderful comments. The conversation reminds me of the ones that happened earlier in this blog's history. Jeanene's last day at work is Thursday. After that I have more time. Among other things, I intend to bend myself backward a bit and take up some of the writing style of earlier days. The main thing is, it takes a lot of time to write from your gut. Because you have to nurture your unconscious mind and listen to where it meets your theology and worldview.

So this is so encouraging to me. THANKS.

"It's all one thing."

This is why I still keep visiting your blog, dear RLP. I am not a religious person, but I do have a persistent faith that finds meaning in the interconnection of all things. Something of a pantheist, you might say.

~ Julie

Honestly, I'm not entirely certain where my faith stands. I believe as much as I can understand. The rest I try to take in as best as I can. I have very dear friends with a huge spectrum of different belief systems. I respect their opinions, and I get where they are coming from. At times, I even wonder if they might be right. But at the same time, deep down, I feel like I would be an idiot not to believe.

I know that doesn't make sense. Doesn't really make sense to me either. I just pray that it doesn't have to.

LGF

You make me pine for such a conversation, Gordon...

Mine is an evolving faith - I read a wonderful article in a magazine at Barnes & Noble yesterday while I had breakfast there. The magazine is called "What Is Enlightenment" and the article was titled "Death of the Mythic God". An awesome interview with an ex-monk, very reverent, very challenging and inspiring.

The web link is http://www.wie.org, but unfortunately you can't read the article there - lots of other interesting stuff, though!

Blessings to you, my brother :)

http://www.myspace.com/ashvajenny

I'm living a lie. As I read RLP's post and all of the comments, I became acutely aware that I'm like an actor on a stage following a script. I'm not really any of the roles, and yet I blindly recite my lines because I've memorized them so well. I have become more conscious of the lie during the past couple years during which I have become so totally turned off by the practices of my church. I want to say, "God, if you're real, why are you allowing such assholes to speak for you"?

Sister Marie

Sister Marie finally called me out. I guess I'm a fraud too.

I was struck by your question regarding what kind of faith do you have. For me they describe the stages of my faith from the early days born of fear, to the self righteous days of youthful arrogance, to a certain desperation that surely it all means something, to that stubborn place. The last I suspect is really a combination of the first three. I surely I couldn't have been so fearfully, arrogantly, desperately wrong, about something so seemingly important.

Interestingly, after struggling with the issue for so many years, I have come to a place where it just doesn't matter. God or no God makes no more difference than Aliens or no Aliens. I don't know the answer to either question and I have no particular bone to pick with folk who take either of the positions. I don't think any more or less of believers or nonbelievers. I have only my experience to fall back on and having gone from seminary to ignoring the issue for a decade and back to church for a decade, I can safely say that the sun shines and the rain falls the same whichever course I am on. Inescapably, I suppose i have been shaped by folk of faith in my background, so I know the formula, can do and say the appropriate things in my faith culture. But believe it? Can't say as I do anymore. So, I suppose I have become a fraud without really knowing it.

HKR

hello gordon
this is
my first
reading of your blog
and
i thank you
for sharing
nancy

theblogofnancy.blogspot.com

Thanks for another thought-provoking piece of writing, RLP! I guess I am one of these people: "...the sort who has always seen the default human position as NOT believing in magic or gods or any of that stuff" I have just never felt capable of believing. I grew up going to church - my dad was a youth minister - but I have a distinct childhood memory of realizing for the first time that people actually believed all the stuff they tell you in church. It was a shocking realization because I'd always just assumed it was made up stories that they told kids. At several times in my life I've tried to become more religious and although I kind of like practicing religion, I always end up feeling like a hypocrit because deep down I just can't believe in god.

Over the last couple of years, my faith, my beliefs, have changed as I've entered mid-life. I used to be Christian, but now, I'd refer to myself as a "freelance monotheist" as I've heard someone refer to themself, or maybe a monotheistic pagan - the pagan part being a growing need of being spiritually close to Nature. There are certain things that seem to be expected of Christians to believe by Christian culture, but it was too much "energy" to keep accepting those beliefs or not even thinking about them deeply. I quit believing in a god that for some reason is angry with his Creation - an "angry volcano god" if you will, a god that "prefers" certain groups of people over others, or a God that merely created Nature for Man to dominate. I got tired of trying to maintain these beliefs and dropped them, and some others. Metaphorically I feel as I'm now on a journey through trackless steppes, but I somehow feel freer to find and meet God directly, rather than through just acceptance of someone else's writings on their own spiritual experiences or interpretation of scriptures. Somehow I have to find a balance of freedom with the importance of community. For many years I was part of a community, but right now I'm needing spiritual freedom, it seems. Certainly exciting, clearly I'm no longer in Kansas.

Thanks, RLP for sharing your writings, and your ministry of providing this blog.
Larry

sometimes i wish all the time people spend thinking about faith they would use to think about humanity. i have a hard time figuring out why it matters if there is a spiritual life when there are so many tragedies in human life.

in all honesty, however, the time other spend in prayer/contemplation/thinking, i more often than not spend watching TV rather than helping humanity.

"...use the time to think about/help humanity."

I imagine that a lot of us believe that truly helping human tragedies requires a transforming power, and that the power of positive thinking (etc) will only get you so far. I think it's quite possible that human tragedies result from (CS Lewis) "the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

If there's nothing spiritual to life, why bother? I mean, I may get a little bit of a warm feeling from helping someone, but it's a lot easier and (temporarily?) more enjoyable to watch TV.

This is no glib answer: the key to being right with others is being at peace with God. That's what I'm shooting for, and that's why I spend time thinking about faith and reading this blog.

irt human tragedies from: "the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

i can't criticize this statement for being apologetic--it was CS Lewis. But, I find very little comfort or satisfaction in that statement when I consider the shameful and needless destitution in which so many people in this world live.

A large portion of wealth of the western world has relied on the exploitation of the third world. Applying the CS Lewis statement to this situation, however, is paternalistic and demoralizing to people in the third world.

Oh, also to the poster above. I'm sorry if I implied that spending time dealing with matters of faith is a waste of time. I don't believe that; something I find admirable about people of faith is how self-aware and thinking they tend to be.

I think I'm a Christian agnostic. It comforts me lately to realize that really, no matter how many pages and books and electrons have been spent in talking about what happens after we die, we really, actually, honestly don't know. Even the people who claim to have come back from the other side only have the vaguest of descriptions. So...my uncertainty is not something strange. We just live in a world we won't ever 100% understand. Physics keeps giving us a clearer and clearer picture of the building blocks of matter, and yet doubles and triples the unanswered questions about them at the same time. So we shouldn't be surprised that spirituality is not easily nailed down.

I want to believe in Him, to fall madly in love with the best person that ever was. Right now, all I know is that I am in love with someone who does believe they know Him, who sees and feels and touches something that I don't always see. And yet--sometimes I do see something, and what I see is incredibly wonderful and precious and awe-inspiring. I catch little glimpses of hope and eternity and the sheer beauty and delicacy and strength makes me want to cry. But I don't know how personal it is--the personal side of my faith usually comes from people. Maybe God talks through people. Maybe he knows that I need, like the child in a story I read once said, "God with skin on."

I feel like I am a better person when I believe--or, rather, when I take time to go to church and do some of the rituals, because it makes me focus. It drags me away from my computer screen and makes me think about whether all these things are true, and about whether, if there is a God, what he would want me to do.

And somehow, I have to figure out how to help the humans around me. If nothing else is true about my faith, it is true that Jesus said that the ones who followed him best were the ones who helped others. The sheep, the Good Samaritan, the one who was forgiven much because they loved much. And that I can do even while I am not entirely sure what the correct theology is.

(My mother used to say that she knew God existed, but wondered if he loved her. My father used to say that he knew that if God existed, he loved him, but he wasn't always sure God existed.)

God is love, eh?

--NAR

Hey, I'm coming here from slactavist, who linked this post today.

My faith is none of these, and it's also not a faith in the way you've described it. I don't have the belief, but I have the faith. Belief is at the core of most faith, but it can be removed. It's not needed. You're left with a faith which is soft, malleable. My faith, if it needs to be in something specific, is in the joy of life, in the incredible beauty that is the human spirit. My faith is in creation. Most of all it is inspired by that which is completely ineffable.

I feel like I'm somewhere between your 'dreamy, courageous scientist types' and your stubborn faith. I have no beliefs for the former reasons, but I've stubbornly kept my faith regardless. Not just kept, but found. I stared into the universe, just like you, and found nothing on offer. So I built my own.

If I were to meet the creator, I would still maintain this. His power is doubtless great, but at the same time, it is not him that seems important, but the act of creation itself. My meaning is self-created and wonderful. The creator can have his own meaning which is just as wonderful, but if I were expected to give up my own meaning in deference to his, it would seem like I was being asked to adopt that arrogant faith, and that's something I won't do. I could have belief in the creator, obviously, but my faith already lies elsewhere. My meaning is my own, and has nothing to do with any original intention to my existence, whether there is one or not.

In the meantime, I play. A sense of play is central to my faith. I play with meaning, I play with ideas, I play with theologies and doctrine. I work towards owning as few of them as possible, but many of them have been borrowed for a very long time, and are near and dear to me.

Are you familiar with the phrase 'ha ha, only serious'? It comes from an inversion of 'ha ha, only kidding', and describes things which are both not serious and deeply serious. This captures the flavor of my faith very well. It isn't 'ha ha', in that it's not put in a humorous way, but it is also not completely understood if you only understand the way in which it is entirely serious. The element of play is just as important.

You are a very interesting preacher man, Mr.RLP. I would not mind sitting at a table with you, under the stars, and discussing things, whatever those things might be.

I come somewhere between the "stubborn faith" and "dreamy scientist non-faith" catagories. Wavering between Agnostic and Discordian - depending on my mood and how much chaos I perceive around me. Though while most Discordians lean heavily towards the chaos end of the scale, I quite like both ends. The seemingly random scattering of stars, and the patterns you can make out of them, if you join the dots! hehe.

It's nice to see a preacher like you on the internets. The frothing lunatics get far too much bandwidth nowdays!

(From the mind of His Holeyness, Pope Sir Thalass T'Kynn - Defender of Space Pirates and occasional Mad Scientist)

I'm not sure I fit any of those. I'm a Pagan mystic, and faith isn't as big a deal to me as perception and practice...I have spiritual experiences, and I might try to explain them to myself and others, but I'm aware that the explanation is only my theory about what happened. The experience itself is real, but the meaning is open. The other part of it is that my practice makes my life better; I am a happier, kinder, more centered and vivid person than I was before. My particular tradition (Feri) is a lot like Buddhism, specifically Theravada Buddhism, in a number of ways; one of which is that belief or lack of belief doesn't change the results.

As a lurker who found his way here from slacktivist, doesn't especially intend to debate but will read a bit, well...

A lot of my faith is angry. I guess because I grew up in a semi-Christian childhood, my dad converted and tried incessantly to get me in, so I might be biased. My objection to Christianity and religion in general is its how strident it is on its own necessity. It's framed by a hell so horrible it MUST be avoided, and a heaven so incredible you MUST want it. I feel that this fear and abject longing for something believers feel they aren't going to get here, but are absolutely sure they get after they die, results in a strong disregard for everyone else, and the rest of the world. This in turn results in them feeling justified in doing nasty things in service of their faith, whether getting new believers or obstructing discussion of their religion. 'No sin to lie in service of a greater Truth,' I guess.

So I guess mine is a faith like a sword. Mean, angry, and sharp. If I could actually convince anyone of stuff, I'd slice off your faith right where it says that the world is in supernatural danger, that individuals need to be saved or live in fear of anyone. I don't really care what it means to you, but where it says someone else is evil and irredeemable, I'm chopping that shit to bits.

Specific to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, I feel all three are based on a fundamentally evil idea, the Fall from Eden. I can't tell you how angry this story makes me. God creates man, sticks him on the earth, tells him not to do one thing. Now, elsewhere in the bible, man gets described as a child. A thousand years is a day to God, apparently. So a child to God, not a day old to God, gets cursed forever, suffering, for one act, when he never understood consequences. There was an open well in my father's yard, once. When we moved in, the very first thing my dad did was seal it up. I was seven at the time. I'd done plenty wrong before, but I wasn't smote so far as I remember. But God, having a fair idea of how man worked, seeing as how he made him, didn't close up the well, just kinda warned him, but said 'yah, just don't do that,' man falls down the well, God spits on him, saying 'screw you, you're stuck there now.' Suffice to say, for me the only thing that would go even partially towards redeeming God for that would be a complete lack of understanding of mistakes or imperfection. Should I get anywhere near the God of the Book and discover it's true in a metaphorical or literal way, I would liberally beat the shit out of him with sheer force of rage, omnipotence or no.

I think the story of the fall sets the stage for a self-fulfilling prophecy of humanity, a perception that we're evil. Behind it, there's the belief that we live in a degenerating universe, that everything came from God, and nothing else can do anything but pervert it, and all we're good for is telling God how magnificent he is. Yay, God. You can make cheerleaders, go You.

So, once we get past all that long ranting, what do we have? I don't really know. I've felt, when I was searching for something to have faith about, that there is something, but that no faith came close to what it really is, but was best when it focussed on the goddamn world it's in, and not on how to make it cleaner or better, but how to make the people in it happier.

Even if the story about the fall has tons of mitigating factors, I'm still kicking Abraham, Moses, Jesus, John, and Mohammed in the balls. Judgemental pricks.

RLP, it would be lovely to have a philosophical conversation with someone so generous and respectful toward people whose beliefs differ from yours.

I hope I am a humble atheist rather than an arrogant one, because it seems to me that atheism is all about humility. If we are not the center of God's creation, but just some silly puny apes in a little world in one random galaxy among billions in the vast universe, who are we to be arrogant? Or to feel unwarranted certainty about great mysteries to which no one has yet a definitive answer, rather than humble about how limited our knowledge is compared to how vast our ignorance? I'd like to think I'm too humble for faith (by which I mean, for belief without evidence), and content to be a seeker of truth.

[Hm, I didn’t mean to submit that namelessly, so let me register and try that again:]

RLP, it would be lovely to have a philosophical conversation with someone so generous and respectful toward people whose beliefs differ from yours.

I hope I am a humble atheist rather than an arrogant one, because it seems to me that atheism is all about humility. If we are not the center of God’s creation, but just some silly puny apes in a little world in one random galaxy among billions in the vast universe, who are we to be arrogant? Or to feel unwarranted certainty about great mysteries to which no one has yet a definitive answer, rather than recognize how limited our knowledge is compared to how vast our ignorance? Until those mysteries are solved, I should like to be humble enough to have no faith (by which I mean, no belief without empirical evidence), and content to be merely a seeker of truth.