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My wife will ask me how I slept, and if I had a good night I will say "Like god during the Holocaust", and she never likes that joke
I've always thought from the perspective of the one praying it is self centered of one to think God answered their prayers and they're dreams because they are special I guess but ignores the prayers of so many other people. It's so confounding.
I dont think this is that simple. It sounds like a problem of evil deal which Ive never found compelling.
It's not the problem of evil. The problem of evil is how EVIL can exist if a good God that only wants good created the world. The problem of SUFFERING is closer, which questions why suffering, and in the stronger versions specifically gratuitous and meaningless suffering, exists if a maximally powerful being that wants the best for the beings he created made the world, and knew that suffering would happen.
The reason that adding another property to that God of answering prayer requests made by the being he created is that now we are also claiming that God specifically intervenes to help his creation. But in the time of greatest need for millions of the beings he created, he did nothing to stop the terrible torture and abuse they were undergoing, even while apparently choosing to help others with far more trivial problems. It doesn't demonstrate that a God doesn't exist, but it does seem to raise questions about the morality of that being if they do exist.
“If there is a God, He will have to beg for my forgiveness.” - etched into the wall of a concentration camp.
And if God did plan for evil (he created "Satan", "the opposer" after all), then evil can't be all that bad. I had a friend who was a devout Christian who committed suicide back in October. He was silently suffering, likely with the onset of schizophrenia, but none of us knew that.
When I criticized God for not listening to my friend's prayers, my sister said, "Have you considered the part your friend played in this?" Right, I forgot; he played the part of the helplesd wretch begging on his knees for his Savior to help him. What a criminal 😩
This message is kind of dark, but a very important part of my story
It also does raise questions that they (that God) aren't guaranteed to have any morality yet people worship that being even when it doesn't have to prove it's deference to caring about us because it is above that apparently. God doesn't need to prove he is good. So many people parrot God is good but they can't define what good is other than a self absorbed definition that serves God himself. How can religious people worship something thet claim is absolute goodness when they can't even define what goodness is.
I still don't find the suffering problem compelling either, mostly because, if people are being honest, we can't really say what objectively amounts to "gratuitous" suffering. We just can't know where that line is.
The problem with that approach is that while we may not be able to precisely identify the point at which something crosses the line, that doesn't mean that line doesn't exist or that we can't easily identify things that are far over the line. You can see this in another example of this type, called "Sorites Paradoxes". Consider this argument:
If we are honest, we can't objectively say how many grains of sand is a heap. One grain of sand isn't, 5 billion is, but we just can't come to an objective definition of where between one or two grains and many grains we objectively have a heap of sand. Does that mean that we can't say whether heaps of sand actually exist because we can't point to the line at which it becomes a heap? I don't know of any reasonable person that would make that claim, and philisophers certainly don't.
In the same way, I agree that I couldn't point to a pain/justification scale and say "8.05 pain with only 0.13 justification is acceptable, but 8.06 pain and only 0.12 justification is clearly gratuitous". That doesn't change the fact that we can still clearly identify examples of obviously unnecessary suffering that is gratuitous. (TRIGGER WARNING: gratuitous violence and suffering) Restricting yourself from saying that suffering is gratuitous just because you can't say the EXACT point it crossed into that category is unnecessarily limiting your empathy and humanity.
Another way to see how ludicrous this position becomes is to also look at it in the opposite direction. If we don't have an objective line for gratuitous suffering, we could argue it may be the case that ALL suffering is gratuitous and serves no purpose. But these types of word games don't change the fact that we have the words to describe "gratuitous suffering" because we have observed that it describes reality in a way that provides a useful distinction between different types of suffering that is readily apparent in many cases, although not necessarily all.
If you had an experience that you see as a miracle, can’t you just believe in that experience on its own? In other words, even if a person has an experience that convinces them of the power of prayer why would that necessarily mean that the God who answered the prayer is the God of Christianity, the Bible is his word, Jesus is the messiah, and so on?
For example, I don’t currently believe that vampires exist. If I saw somebody drinking another person’s blood and then turning into a bat, I’d definitely have to question my assumptions, but I wouldn’t jump straight to “vampires exist AND Dracula is an entirely true story AND werewolves must exist, too”.
Also, if one time that prayer seemed to result in a miracle makes you believe, does every time where prayer results in nothing add weight to disbelief? There seems to be a bias there.
why would that necessarily mean that the God who answered the prayer is the God of Christianity, the Bible is his word, Jesus is the messiah, and so on?
It wouldn't, but that's the one I asked for help lol.
Otherwise I wouldn't make that connection.
Ok, but even then there isn’t really one Christian God. There are as many ideas of what that God is like as there are Christians, and often they are wildly contradictory. Like were you praying to the God of the conservative Christians who rejects gay people, or the God of the progressive Christians who embraces them?
Not trying to be snarky, it’s just complicated.
I dont really make that distinction, it's all the same God people comprehend differently as far as I'm concerned.
Different enough that these interpretations are mutually exclusive. You can see that as all the same God, but then which specific interpretation of this God does this miracle point to?
I mean, I went Catholic. In my experience the church doesn't reject gays categorically from joining.
The homosexuality thing was just one example of why its not a simple conclusion of miracles exist, therefore God exists, because even within Christianity there are so many mutually-exclusive ideas of who that God is and what he wants. Even if God exists, these different ideas of that one God can’t all coexist. So what made you decide to attribute the miracle to the Catholic interpretation of God?
I've long studied Christianity and religion in general out of pure interest, and concluded pretty solidly that, if it were to be true, Christianity could only be authentically lived in either the Catholic or Orthodox churches (including Oriental Orthodoxy) based on church history, continuity of theology, etc. I happened to have a connection in the Catholic church already, and it just went from there.
The gods of the Old Testament come from mythology of the surrounding areas. There is not one god mentioned in the bible. Christianity has boiled it down to one god, but that is not true to the text.
God's Monsters is a great read. Get it on Audible. It is captivating and enlightening.
I'm aware of these ideas, I found that they appear to make sense but aren't based on very strong evidence. It's a lot of conjecture based on relatively little. The Esoterica video on Yahweh prompted a hard look into that.
I forgot to mention Dr. Kip Davis in my prior post. He is a former Christian and is currently an Old Testament scholar. Dr. Kip Davis left Christianity after getting educated on the Bible.
Actually, Yahweh's pagan origins are based on extremely strong evidence. Check out r/AcademicBiblical
The apologist arguments used to sound strong to me when I believed. Now, it all sounds very dumb. I read the book The Evidence That Demands a Verdict and thought it was good evidence. Then I watched hours of an athiest working through the book and destroying it. There is no evidence.
Then I read Bart Ehrman's book, Misquoting Jesus and learned that the Bible is not inerrant and is contradictory. There are many good youtube channels where biblical scholars educate lay people about the history, contradictions, and everything. I can't believe I spent 30 years studying this book and believing the religion! I thought ibwas smart and could think critically.
Listen to the doubts you are having and educate yourself before you waste your life living a falsehood.
Youtube: Mindshift, Data over Dogma (Dan MacClaren), Misquoting Jesus (Bart Ehrman)
Well said
I've never read the first book, but I have seen Bart himself get solidly defeated in debate, and found decent responses to many of the claims of contradictions and the like. I've never come across any objections that seemed unassailable; despite that, something still doesn't feel right.
I had those "it doesn't feel right" moments for years. It was cognitive dissonance because my mind could see issues with it, but my faith kept me from looking more into that. I wish I had listened to that intuition sooner.
I was you, OP, so I understand perfectly well. After being brought up an Atheist I lived something miraculous too, and I converted. But there was always a "something" that didn't sit well with me, so I kept church-hopping in hopes of finding "The One True Church of Christ". Every denomination sounded marvelous at first, their reasoning sound, their apologetics for being "The One True Church of Christ" unbeatable. But then, over time, that unknown "something" would make its way in, and I'd church-hop once more. I was in 6 different churches, mainstream ones, big players, with centuries of theological work backing them.
But after #6 that's when it hit me: if there were a "One True Church of Christ" it'd be blatantly obvious to all which one was it and there wouldn't be 30,000+ denominations. So I desperately dived into history trying to find "The Historical One True Church of Christ", and what I found shocked me. Again, all of them claimed to be "The One" while the rest were heretical. Demonstrably, there was no single "One True Church" with a myriad of off-shoots. "Christianities" was the norm from the very beginning.
That's when my deconstruction started. If there's no One True Church, there's no Absolute Truth, and thus Christianity is false. So I left, I stopped believing.
But in my mind I kept coming back to the miracle I had lived, I knew it wasn't imagined. So that's when it hit me like a ton of bricks: salve from that one time, I never felt the presence of whom I had interpreted to be the Christian God. My 10 years since thinking I had discovered him were as sterile and as unproductive as talking to a wall. So I came to the realization that what I had lived didn't come from the Christian God (which, due to his proven silence, I no longer believe exists), it had come from somewhere or someone else that does interact with the human world. And thus my search and journey started towards finding what or who else is out there, spiritually speaking.
I hope that my experience provides food for thought.
I'm absolutely abysmal with praying for the same reasons. With one exception, nothing seems to come of it. I don't expect much, but something would be nice. If anything, things seem to have gotten worse since then.
Praying only works when u genuinely believe it’ll work. When you believe it’ll work you’ll shape your life around that belief, as with any other belief. You’ll start looking for it more and therefore you notice that it seems to appear more in your daily life. This is called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Not only that but you will act in a way that makes you further your belief. You will start avoiding anything that makes it go wrong and you will head towards things that make it go right. In reality it’s not “God” it’s all those little survival instincts being filtered through your ego. Ppl have no idea the power and weirdness that their brain possesses so they will attribute things they can’t explain to a higher power. So basically true prayer is “manifestation” at its most personal level. But once you realize this it’s actually harder to believe in your prayers.
Are you expecting some sort of emotional/psychological result from prayer, or tangible answers to things you ask for in prayer?
Anything at all, honestly. I get nothing.
You're attending a Catholic Church, correct? I assume their worship services are different to evangelical ones (I've only been to one mass)?
Yes, they're quite different
Look up Animism. That was the first religion ever and it’s what pretty much every other religion can trace its origin to. Imo any religion that judges imperfect character to the point that something like cursing will send you to hell is just a case of government censorship. Religions like Christianity have historically been the best way to control mass groups of ppl, that’s why cults are so dangerous.
I converted a little over a year ago after an event I could only describe as a miracle in direct, immediate response to my prayer.
What was the miracle?
Not to go too deep into it, but I was told someone very close to me was dying, like, within a day or two dead type dying, by medical professionals. I prayed they would live and recover from their illness. Next day, they were like new, complete 180° from certain death.
That's amazing, I'm glad your loved one is healthy.
I kind of had a similar situation with the doctors and tests being wrong when my wife was pregnant. She and her doctor and her thyroid test all agreed that her thyroid level was fine, but I had a gut feeling and urged them to test her again anyway. It turned out that her levels actually were off, her medication was adjusted, and perhaps listening to my gut feeling is what saved us from having another miscarriage. I don't have any explanation for my feeling, but I also don't have any reason to think it's something supernatural.
I'm glad that your wife and child are alright. I know mistakes happen and things are overlooked sometimes, medicine isn't perfect and all, but when they told me the tests they did, and how bad the situation was (the whole ordeal took all day and I watched them rapidly deteriorate consistently right up to getting the news), it seemed like the tests were aligned with what I was seeing happen right in front of me. I don't know, it seemed too much to be coincidence.
Not to sound harsh, but why did a deity answer your particular prayer instead of the millions of others that they didn't? What made you and this person so special?
Why did they allow all of those children to die in Gaza, for instance, and instead "healed" your family member?
It couldn't be just faulty tests/mistakes by doctors and the person not being as bad off as people thought, or even the human bodies' amazing ability to heal itself sometimes, could it?
The human brain is always trying to see patterns in things. Paradoleia describes it with visual patterns, but we also do that with events when we try to make sense of things.
Please try to think this through reasonably and don't fall prey to magical thinking.
Not to sound harsh, but why did a deity answer your particular prayer instead of the millions of others that they didn't? What made you and this person so special?
I truly don't know.
It couldn't be just faulty tests/mistakes by doctors and the person not being as bad off as people thought, or even the human bodies' amazing ability to heal itself sometimes, could it?
It could be, but it didn't feel like it.
So you are just going off of a feeling? I'm guessing you aren't big on logic and reasoning. Whatever works for you, I guess.
Logic and reasoning tell me materialism/atheism is incoherent, so I have to look elsewhere.
Your logic and reasoning are clearly faulty but my best to you. May you find what you are looking for without harming yourself or others.
How is atheism incoherent?
This right here.
Just because you didn’t see the circumstances leading up to the event that you consider a miracle doesn’t mean it was supernatural in nature.
Ask this: why did a god answer your prayer when there are starving children crying for his miracles? Why doesn’t god heal amputees? Why is he letting people die across the planet, many of who are faithful?
The answer of course is that all answered prayer is merely a coincidence.
"I've never found the criticisms of the church about things like morality, or biblical contradictions etc very convincing, there are a lot of apologetics that capably answer those questions..." .
What apologetics can solve the problem of Yahweh/Jehovah (biblical god of Moses) admitting that he sends lying spirits to people? 2 Chronicles 18:22 says, "Now therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil against thee."
Even if there is apologetics for it, why trust it when the bible clearly says that the biblical god sends lying spirits?
Based on your comments here, what’s happening is that your reason is battling with the feeling that you saw a miracle, and possibly with a part of you that really wants something magical to believe in. Ie, you say that your loved one’s recovery felt like a miracle, but you realize on some level that there’s nothing about her or you that demands miraculous healing over the countless of us who go through terrible lives and horrible deaths with no help.
You say that since the apparent miracle, your life has been as stagnant as ever — maybe even worse. So naturally a part of you knows even if what you saw was some sort of miracle, christianity is powerless to explain it.
I think what you need to decide is what you want — do you want to just believe in true things, or do you want to believe in what feels ‘miraculous’?
I got I trouble for my earlier comment. So I will try and be respectful. I don’t understand what you are trying to achieve here. Are you looking for help leaving religion?
I think I'm already on the way out and just yelling out into the ether.
Yes!! Come on. I feel so liberated. At Christmas, my sister in law looked to me as if to suggest I should pray for the meal as I was always the one that did public prayers. I was very good at it. And I started off, “Powerful Zeus…..l and just laughed and said that there would be no communal prayer but that they were free to pray on their own.
I bet that was fun
There were some uncomfortable discussions after but my brother in law (her husband) approached me later when I was alone and told me he totally fakes it so she doesn’t get mad. I felt bad for him. They are Catholic too and his mom is the biggest jerk and hate filled person I know.
My family is largely nominal Catholics, never been hateful, but definitely not deeply involved.
I call that the club. Like my sister in law and husband. Pre marital sex. Lived together before marriage. Used invetro to get pregnant.
Yeah...I can't really do that. It feels dishonest. I look at it as an all or nothing deal, and so do they, half measures don't cut it.
One reason it took me so long to leave was that I cared too much about what other people thought of me. Once I decided their opinions meant nothing, I was able to live life as I wanted. My wife is still holding on. I go to church with her every Sunday. But our church is an LGBTQ affirming and focused on decedents of enslaved people. Super liberal. Just like Jesus was portrayed.
I dont really care much for how other people see me, my friends are almost universally non-Catholic and I endured the confused looks when I converted, I'm sure it would not be unwelcome news.
Spirituality is personal. You don't have to be part of anything that doesn't resonate with you.
You've experienced something you can't explain in any other way. Start with your experience and work your way from there.
This is also how my wife started, as she thinks God healed her. But after a year of church she realized she doesn't fit in. She still considers herself a Christian. But you don't have to.
I believe in something. I don't have a name for it. I had too many experiences that can only be described as miraculous. But there are as many religions as there are nations. There are endless sects of Christianity alone.
More than one thing can be true at once. Spirituality can exist. God can exist. And the Bible can still be man-made. Jesus could have existed. But why would God condemn the majority of humanity over time who did not or could not know christ?
Go with what resonates with you and makes sense to you. Call it your own.
That's pretty much what I did my whole life up until the past year.
Then what's the problem now? You've tried this for a year and it didn't work. Perhaps whatever you were doing before worked for you since you got immediate result from your prayer.
I'm not sure if there is a problem, or if I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill. I guess I wanted to believe in something more than I could reasonably justify to myself
Faith is acceptance without evidence, not a reliable path to the truth.
I dont think that's quite what faith is. We all have faith in a great many things. I have faith the sun will rise tomorrow based on a mountain of evidence suggesting it will. I don't know it will, but I have faith it will. Faith is more like trust rather than blind acceptance.
Not to say there may not be stronger evidence that the sun will rise than that the Christian God in particular is there, but you see what I mean, I'm sure.
Two millenia of Christian faith still no evidence for their claim a god exists. If there was evidence they would not talk of Christian faith, but of Christian evidence.
There's evidence, it may not always be evidence everyone will find convincing, but evidence nonetheless.
If the Christian god exists, a god that supports the immoral practice of slavery, committed genocide and infanticide, and sanctioned murder, rape, and pillaging by its chosen people is immoral and undeserving of worship.
If you have evidtnce submit fircreview. and collect hour Nobel Prize.
Evidence doesn't mean proof
I’m trying to hold my tongue because I got in trouble earlier but it feels like you want to debate with people on the legitimateness of Jesus and God. We joined this Reddit to communicate and connect with others that were religious but are no longer. What are you hoping to achieve here?
I dont really know. I'm in a space where I'm not really sure I believe anymore, but I guess not for the reasons many other people lost their own faith. Trying to talk about it on the Christian subs would only get apologetics thrown at me or being told to pray/speak to my priest, all of which I've already done.
I used to teach Sunday school. My wife and I lead youth group. My kids went to Christian private school. I always had a feeling in the back of my head that it was all ridiculous. Meant to control people and help our fragile minds handle the idea of mortality. I read Mere Christianity 5 times to try and get myself there intellectually. Then I started really studying the Bible and realized it’s just nonsense. If there is a God, they either don’t care, aren’t aware or are powerless. There is so much death and evil in this world and an all, knowing, all powerful and all loving “father” just allows it to happen? No thanks.
I read Mere Christianity 5 times to try and get myself there intellectually. Then I started really studying the Bible and realized it’s just nonsense.
I hate needing to take things on long stretches of faith, I want to know, or at least come as close as possible to knowing; and so I've tried to intellectualize it all as much as I can, but feel like I've hit the wall on how far that can go before rejecting clear dogmas...and it's still not enough. I feel like if I can't take the religion as it presents itself, I can't just twist it into what I wish it was.
Speaking to a priest about your doubt is pointless. If I take my BMW to the shop, they are going to find something wrong. It’s their job. They’ve given their entire lives to god. You can’t expect a fair and balanced response. They are there to keep you in the club. Especially Catholics. My wife taught at a Catholic school for years by the way. Catholicism is all about rules and punishment and atonement and more rules. The dogma is exhausting.
I actually currently teach at one, lol. Another thing that's bothered me is that I've needed to take very esoteric positions on some core dogmas in order to be able to "accept" them. It more and more feels like it shouldn't be this hard or need this much galaxy brain reasoning to get it "right" in a way that doesn't feel terrible.
She left last year. We have a gay kid and my wife and I are progressives and it was too much. The parents saw her marriage equality and BLM sticker on her Subaru and called the head master and priest.
I'm sorry that was an issue. I've had gay students but the school didn't really mind it.
There is no proof
I know
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17d
I mean, as far as I know there isn’t an r/questioningchristian sub.
They aren't the one breaking the rules, you are.
Everyone is welcome so long as they aren't breaking the rules.
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When someone believes that god can answer prayers with miracles, and they also believe that millions of Jews died horribly in the Holocaust, they must necessarily believe that the god who answers their prayers is the same who denied the prayers of millions of his chosen people as they died horribly.
Miracles existing would make god more evil than if they didn't exist, because miracles imply a god who thought Holocaust victims basically deserved death, a god who refused to snap his fingers and throw open the doors of the concentration camps, because... Nazis pray better than Jews?