How can this pilgrim acquire faith?
I was raised in a pretty fundamentalist version of Christianity (Pentecostalism). I had faith while I was there, then lost it when I came to an age where I could make my own decisions and decided that being Pentecostal was in no way for me. It took me a while to separate faith from organized religion. In my experience of having faith but also having questions, I realized that faith does take a certain amount of suspension of disbelief – at least it did for me. But I was not willing to suspend my disbelief for the particular religion I was being raised in. After I moved past the issues I had with religion, I realized that although I didn’t want to follow one particular belief system, that I missed faith itself. Out of the bad that came out of being Pentecostal, there was some good too – and for me, it resided in the idea of faith. So I started to read about different belief systems and, while I am pretty sure I don’t want to follow a particular religion, there are elements of some for w
The unfortunate fact is that anything that really qualifies as a “Religion” inevitably couples the spiritual guidance you seek with stories of miracles, theories of cosmic organization, afterlife speculations, and “moral” edicts in regards to sexual and social behavior; all of which are patently ridiculous, demonstrably false, or just plain nonsensical. What you are looking for is the spiritual without the religious. The faith-based dichotomy you describe is crucial and unavoidable. In order to accept any of the teachings which may give you the spiritual comfort you seek, you will need to turn off the critical-thinking part of your brain. What I would do in your shoes is seek the help of a good, SECULAR, counselor or psychotherapist who might be able to help you work through these feelings of inadequacy or deprivement that are driving this desire to feel faith. I can tell you I turned my back on faith a long time ago and have never looked back, living a happy and fulfilled life without
JaySunSee – faith certainly does not always precede the miracle. I met (and spoke with) God at a time in my life when I was most certainly a very vocal agnostic. All that was left was to find an organization that matched the impression I had been given – especially one that reconciled my very new faith with my very old fascination with the scientific method. I found the UCC and have been perfectly happy since. I wrote about my faith conversion on askme once. I would encourage you to see as much of the world as possible – any exposure to third-world countries and/or places that you read about in children’s books. Jungles, deserts, tundra, mountain tops. Keep a very open, very quiet mind. If I can go out on a painfully metaphysical limb here… There is a very, very quiet voice that has something important to
I struggle with the same questions myself and in my searching I randomly came across the book “Faith Without Religion” by Fred Brown in a university library – it’s a pretty easy read and wasn’t explicitly for or against religion, but simply offered up some personal anecdotes about his father and the search for a fulfilling life.
Well, you could try reading modern theologians. I haven’t read much, and what I have read is entirely in the Christian tradition (and I am an atheist myself), but you’ll find that serious scholars of Christianity do not take the position that every word of the Bible is literal truth. A traditional (and very commonly held) view of things is that religion is simply a set of propositions (eg resurrection, existence of a supernatural creator, etc) in which you either believe or do not believe, end of story. Modern theologians don’t really take this position. Rather, some theologians believe that religion is based on experience, not blind faith in some rather dubious-sounding assertions. The book I read that explained these things most clearly was Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, by Marcus Borg. It presents a much more sophisticated view of God, Jesus, and Christianity in general, than you are li
