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I totally agree. It seems that everything I know has to be completely undone so that God can truly do His work in me and through me.

I also yearn to respond to others in such a way without tripping over myself and feeling like I just made matters worse.

First of all, your experience and Tina's experience are not the same.

Second, your relationship with your masculine He-God may be different from the relationship that God fosters with other of God's creatures.

Third, sincere prayers do not magically evoke sincere answers from God.

Fourth, and this is not directed specifically at you, the correctness or completeness of our "belief" in God does not really matter to the life of faith. Just follow the liturgy and trust. Just stand up and sit down, just eat the bread and drink the juice, just join a committee and send your kids to Sunday School, just sing the hymn. This is the body of Christ; it does not flow from your "belief" in God.

Your story has its own merits, and it seems like you needed to share it. But I must insist: God does not "harvest" faith from us--God plants it in us.

Thanks for your kind engagement with my reply. You turned what had been a kind of brusque and trollish statement from me into something better and generally more optimistic. I don't want to take up too more space on rlp's forum, but I want to repeat what was said about St. John: sometimes the best faith is the faith that finds nothing.

Concerning the "He-man" God comment:
I believe the responder was reacting to the gender specific "He" language in your comment. I personally prefer to think of God as genderless -- or rather beyond gender distinctions. There are those of us who have been abused as children (or even adults) by males and have a hard time relating to God as male. As a person who has struggled with sexuality issues, perhpas you can understand this.
I have had a hard time because I have been objectified (as an attactive female) in this society. I react badly to people who repeatedly pray to "Father God" all the time.
Just 2 cents worth.

I'm interested to know WHY those who don't "believe" WANT to "follow". I mostly believe, but find it difficult to follow. Please explain, if you don't mind, what drives you to follow?

Hope. And the sheer beauty of it all. The ideal of love. And I have seen the results of this following.

'Believe' is over-rated and misunderstood! It's sad that so many people tie up faith with an intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions and loose the pilgrimage of faith which is the Christian life. Jesus didn't create theologians, he called followers.

The word 'believe' is, from my research, not about the mind anyway, but about the heart - from the old english 'be leif' - or 'cling tight too. If i say i believe in God, what i mean is not that i have in my mind certain well-argued thoughts about the nature of a divine being (male or female) but that i cling to a God who, as far as i can see in the Bible, loves me and is referred to in lots of ways, but none so powerful as St John's statement (1 Jn 4.16) 'God is love, and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them'.

Reading my comment above i kind of seem to dive in there with a very strident opening, don't want to change it but do want to take the edge off it by saying 'thanks for the thoughtful, generous and sensitive discussion folks' and thanks RLP for the laughs and the workout for heart and soul your words provide.

Yeah, I didn't say that very well, now that I think about it. I do care about the scientific realities behind the Cosmos. I care deeply about them. I actually consider the truth behind the Cosmos to be God, though I do not think humans are biologically able to perceive that reality and I'm certain I cannot.

I guess what I meant to say is that quibbling over the details of the creation myth in Genesis is a meaningless thing to do. Everything we say about the Cosmos is a myth of one kind or another. Their myth fit them well enough and still communicates spiritual truths even today.

Well... yes, okay, if you stretch the word "myth" to mean "any human explanation of anything, since we're not omniscient."

I have as much respect for myth as I have for science. I've read Eliade, Jung, and Campbell and find truths in them. I've also read a ton of laymen's books on science, and find truths there, too.

But they're not the same truths. I'm not going to look to the current state of string theory if I want to know what people are like; but I'm also not going to look at the Bible to find out how to calculate the diameter of a circle given its radius.

I agree that quibbling over details in Genesis is sort of meaningless; but rejecting the whole thing outright is not. To the best of my ability--and that's the only ability I've been given, and it's not insignificant--I have tried to see any reason whatsoever to accept it. The quibbling details are enough reason to conclude: Until any sort of information becomes available, I'd be very silly to believe that's how any of this came to be.

The exception, the part I don't find silly, is the possibility that there is some sort of sentience or sapience behind it all. But everything built on top of that just looks like flimsy set dressing. I don't think that's how a god would look.

Well, Genesis is a very old myth. The "scientific" details in it are absurd and hopelessly outdated, of course. However, they were cutting edge ideas in their day.

The more important truth is the idea of a loving creator who wants to be in some kind of relationship with the beings he/she created. That's the part of the story that still speaks.

I don't want to stretch the word myth, but perhaps I'm aware that everything we think about the Cosmos is a myth in the making. 500 years from now, people may giggle at string theory. I suppose it will at that time enter the realm of myth. For now, the idea that everything in the Universe can be reduced to a single kind of substance, unthinkably small and numerous, vibrating in billions of different ways, is pretty beautiful to me. I like it.

And really, doesn't string theory sound rather mythic? It's not so very different from a supreme being speaking things into existence with the vibrations of his voice.

500 years from now, people may giggle at string theory

Yes--but that's cutting-edge and still very theoretical, which makes it a bad example on my part. We may giggle at it in 500 minutes.

So let's take a better example. I doubt we'll be giggling at force = mass x velocity in 500 years, 5000 years, or 5,000,000 years. It is, in all likelihood, not a myth in any but the slimmest of senses. Or the basic laws of thermodynamics... probably not myth.

Loving creator: Yes, a possible truth. But elsewhere you referred to meaning and happiness as the utility of this belief. I think those things are worthwhile and important--but is achieving them the same as trying to discern the truth?

And are those two goals even compatible?

And if not, which one's better?

I hope others get how incredible and devastating that comeback was. Force = mass times velocity. That hits pretty hard itself. Beautiful. So yes, I doubt that force=mass times velocity is something I'll be laughing at. Especially if a good sized comet implants itself in the earth's mantle.

I do believe that our senses lead us rightly along. That's why I even knew what string theory is. I love knowledge. And I think we know more about the Cosmos than we did 500 years ago. Real knowledge. Real truth.

This will seem slippery to you, but my heart leads me also in a spiritual path. It's hard sometimes to explain why. At the very least we can say that a good number of humans join me in this desire/quest. Some have said that humanity is outgrowing this need and desire for God. That's not something you and I will know in our lifetimes. I think not, but I have nothing to base that on.

I probably will stop here, but it's been nice chatting. I wish we could talk in person someday.

Now regarding the search for meaning and happiness and its relationship to the search for God and truth, that's in my field, so to speak, and I have a thought or two.

For me the search for God and truth is primary, but I have noticed in a quarter century of following the Christian spiritual path, that the search for God has also brought meaning and joy. But those are truly not my motives. And that is an early lesson in spirituality. Those who seek to be gratified may find gratification, but they are not traveling in the high country.

peace,

gordon

Incredible and devastating, yes, but incorrect. Force = mass x acceleration.

-reverendmother

You know, you really take the romance out of inaccuracy.

What can I say--I'm a rhetorical cold shower. RM

My lousy memory for basic equations aside, I did want to respond to this:

This will seem slippery to you, but my heart leads me also in a spiritual path.

No. That only seems slippery to me if we're assaulting each other's proofs, which we're not. If we're speaking honestly, it sounds like the final word.

I think people with faith sound dignified when they say "I have faith because I've decided to," or "I have faith because I have faith." It's when they try to sound logical and rational about it that things get embarrassing. It's simply not, and anybody who's taken even a single beginning logic class can only stare, slack-jawed, at the intensity of the utter nonsense. The ignorance runs so deep, you can't even answer the intense person's challenges, because they rest on myriad assumptions that make no sense to start with. It always reminds me of a certain classification of boyfriend, who beats up on his girlfriend using the word "logic" whenever she does something he disagrees with.

Uh, dude. That's not logic. That's you being a dick. You want logic, go study your Ps and Qs.

As one heathen sees it:

"The case for God" is vapor.

"My heart leads me" is bulletproof.

Don't study with Ps and Qs too much. "P" stands for pints and "Q" stands for quarts. Of Beer. You study that stuff too long, you get drunk.

Actually... that's just one of several theories as to where "Mind your Ps and Qs" came from.

What I was referring to--while indulging in a little wordplay--is that P and Q are variables often used in teaching basic logic.

Yes, I understand that -- it was a veiled reference that we sometimes lose track of the essential things with overwhelming details -- getting drunk on our own rhetoric. In the finer details of Propositional Calculus, as we move away from basic syllagisms and into more modal forms of symbolic logic; as we look for consistancy, soundness and completeness (and never getting all three), logic becomes less exact. We get drunk in our own arguments and lose track of why we are even creating our paradigms.

In other words, we lose the forest for the trees.

Ah--I missed the reference.

Seeing the forest would be much easier if it weren't invisible.

It seems to me that the two of you are debating facts and Truths with a capital T. The "facts" of Genesis may not be accurate, but the Truths behinnd the symbolism, I believe, are.

I suppose the difference is what you do with the realization that life sucks, as you said, or that the spiritual answers of your childhood are no longer serving you well. If you decide that there is no reality greater than us "making it better," then that is a spiritual kind of decision that you have made.

Surely you have noticed that a very large number of people on our planet do not stop at discovering the Dark Night of the Soul, but continue to search doggedly for the truth of a higher being in the midst of suffering and perhaps in spite of it.

That may not be your journey, but it is provincial to consider it foolish in light of the clear truth that so many of us find happiness and meaning in that search. (Not that you said it was foolish, but some do.)

If you are finding happiness and meaning in your search for God, then it doesn't sound like you're having a Dark Night of the Soul. But it isn't for me to call your night dark. I've had Christians accuse me of having the Dark Night thingy, and I never appreciated it.

They were just uncomfortable being around my own doubts, so they came up with a way of making my experience fit into their own theology. I don't think they ever realized that by saying that God was mysteriously absent, they made God out to be so incredibly ugly, that I wouldn't want to know him anyway.

If Tina salvages something from the wreckage of her Christian faith, good for her. Otherwise, it is a clear truth that many of us find happiness and meaning not searching for a higher being.

I think it's unfortunate that you have never had a friend of faith who was comfortable around your doubts.
The opposite of faith is NOT doubt -- faith can fully embrace doubt. The opposite of faith is faithlessness or apathy. And if that is your journey, why are you here?

Why is it unfortunate? I guess my reality is making you uncomfortable.

You're wrong; the opposite of faith is NOT apathy. Just because I don't believe that finding some invisible being is the meaning of life, does not mean that I don't care about the meaning of life.

I think we are using the same words for different concepts. You read my word unfortunate to mean that it makes me uncomfortable. It doesn't. It makes me sad that you cannot leave your defensiveness to meet me half way for real conversation.

(FYI, Chuck is a very old RLP reader and a good friend of mine. I've even had Mexican food with him and his wife here in San Antonio. I wrote about him once too - http://www.reallivepreacher.com/node/132 )

Chuck, you and I have had this conversation off and on for three years. I don't know, man. You are something of a mystery to me, much as faith seems to be a mystery to you. I guess you are evidence for me (or maybe just a reminder) that humans are individuals and our categories are handy, but really each of us is - to a certain extent - dealing with the universe on our own. Who can know what makes us tick and what drives us to act?

There's always Mexican food and conversation, right? And that ain't half bad.

Chuck's comment's are important -- valid. I've been twice round the bend on faith and Christian theology since childhood. Most recently I stepped out of a pastoral role just before ordination, in part, becuase of my struggles with belief and faith. For some, having faith is as easy as breathing, an acceptable delusion, a ready escape, a life preserver in a storm, a source of identity, a longheld tradition, and to many -- a source of power and hope. But for others, faith is not accessible in any of these ways unless they are willing to lie to themselves.
I no longer believe faith is a "gift from God." I place no blame on the part of those who don't/can't access it. And if there is a God, I don't think he/she does either. My simple, partial answer for myself and others like me is to take the good, decent, loving, and acceptable ideas of (a) religious faith and hold on to those -- making them part of how you live your life. It's better than any alternative I can imagine ... keeps you from doing harm, and if honesty counts for anything in the divine realm, will keep you ready for ... goodness to come.
Lauren

Lauren and I are on the same wavelength. Faith is NOT just belief (like, I believe we will have roast beef for dinner... or I believe in the Easter Bunny) but faith is placing trust in a greater power than what I can control. I choose to faith God. It's more like a verb. Faith is action out of integrity (something that some would call the righteousness of God) in trust. OK, I can't explain it.
But I know it's much deeper than just "belief."

It was better than "not half bad". It was terrific. The food was good, too. I'm happy to call you a friend. And I keep coming back here, hoping...

You're right when you state that each of us must face the universe on his or her own. There's nobody in here but me. You can tell me what you've found, and I can try to understand, but in the end, that's as close as we can get. Is it enough? It's gonna have to be.

This post reminds me of something one of our Canons said in a recent sermon:

"The opposite of faith, let us remember, is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty. The opposite of faith is a heart closed to daily revelation of God at work in the world.”

Oh, and I just thought of a good slogan for mythic criticism:

"Campbell: Now that's some good soup for the soul."

-Andrew
http://www.forgetting-find.blogspot.com

Hey I.S.,

I think I've been to your blog. "Journal of a Strangler?" I guess it was a month or so ago. Can't remember how I found it. I was impressed with your honesty about some of your darker thoughts. That's the kind of stuff some people think but never say. I notice you seem to have abandoned it in January. If that's you, I guess. if that's not your blog, sorry. At any rate, thanks for the kind words.

I suppose you'd have to tell us what you mean by intellectual honesty. In my book, there is nothing dishonest about admitting one's doubts, but committing oneself to a spiritual discipline. It's an intellectual decision to note that in the midst of uncertainty, one can continue to be faithful to a spiritual community.

It would be dishonest, I suppose, to remain in a spiritual community/tradition and deny one's doubts.

Perhaps I'm too logical, but I've always felt it was dishonest to practice a belief you don't actually hold. It's like marrying someone you don't love. Why would you do that (unless you're a masochist)?

That's one of the major problems with Christianity - it's chock full of pious unbelievers who have learned that purported faith is a very convenient means to fulfill less than spirtual goals. I, for one, refuse to be one of them.

Your analogy to marriage is interesting, because that is exactly how I often view my spiritual journey. I may not always feel warm fuzzies for my wife... but our commitment to each other, and our love for one another, goes beyond romantic sentiment. It is the path we have chosen, for better or for worse. I don't see that as masochistic. I may not always "feel" God, or be able to confidently affirm the numerous beliefs that most Christians hold... but my spiritual journey involves more than good feelings and assenting to doctrine. For me, it is a commitment to seek truth, to be open to the possibilities of God, and, to follow in the way of Christ.

Andrew
www.forgetting-find.blogspot.com

There's a difference between practicing a belief you don't hold, and holding a belief you can't prove.

I've also found that there is often value in practicing beliefs you don't hold, just to see what happens. It looks like a paradox, but some things can only be understood through experience, not through deduction. For example, "I don't see why that would work," prevents addicts from recovering.

I'm not Christian either--I'm not religious at all--and it saddens me a little that I can't share that experience with some very fine people. However, I think the fallacy you're falling prey to is the belief that anything that appears illogical is necessarily untrue. That, itself, is illogical.

Very well put. I'm glad someone with the "street cred" of not being a Christian was able to articulate it.

peace|dewde
http://www.furled.com

The problem here is not honesty vs. dishonesty. To be honest, that kind of all-or-nothing language puts people on the defensive. I'm either honest in your book or dishonest in this matter. The truth is that the word believe is not big enough to hold all of its varied meanings, up to and including religious kinds of belief. Now if I pretended to believe in God so that I could get money, that would be very dishonest. But if I have doubts at times, but choose to continue my spiritual practice throughout, that's just reality.

In fact, listen carefully here - no human being can actually be a part of any religion without having doubts from time to time. That's just the way we are wired. The question is, will you admit those doubts and deal with them, talk about them, whatever? Or will you pretend not to have them. I guess there MIGHT be someone out there who never has a doubt, but I don't want to know that person. A person who never has any doubts is a scary person.

I don't see faith and spirituality happening anywhere devoid of doubts and intellectual struggles.

Fair enough. I guess the difference is that some people have doubts and others, for whatever reasons, have an utter disbelief. If all I had were doubts, I think I could deal with that.

I can't quote C.S. Lewis, but there is a line I think of often in both religious and secular contexts. I've never seen it attributed:

He uses statistics the way a drunk uses a lamppost: More for support than enlightenment.