Understanding Doubt
Why do we stop believing?
I don’t think it’s because we “lose” our faith or because we simply no longer believe something to be true. I don’t think it is exclusively a rationalistic experience – “I no longer believe something to be true, therefore I no longer believe”. Instead I believe doubt originates in cognitive dissonance, a disharmony socially, then psychologically. It is tied up with how we understand ourselves in context. Removed from context, everything we believe is challenged because of the social displacement. In that sense, faith is most true when we are removed from our context – yet somehow still believe. I find this applicable to the asian church. Let’s say you’re removed from the comforts of familiar ethno-religious community. Would you still believe? Have you lost your faith yet? Have you re-discovered it outside of that ethnic community?
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Faith is a completely irrational experience from the get go, *but* it is influenced by our life experiences.
Example: A man is a God fearing man all his life — and then unexplicably his wife is killed in a freak gasoline fight accident (sorry, couldn’t resist). He doesn’t understand it…he doesn’t understand why God stole her from him…he doesn’t understand why God killed a good person when there’s so many bad people out there that deserve killing. He can’t rationalize the two situations (his faith in God, and his inability to rationalize the loss of his wife), so his faith in God is shattered, and he falls away.
I don’t think faith has to do with how we view ourselves, but rather the “real world” box that we try to wrap our faith into in order to make it make sense to us.
Christians do it with using archeological proof to help us “believe in” our faith.
I have been very close… extremely close, to losing my faith, to walking away altogether. It was a harrowing and frightening experience to think that I could indeed leave the Christian faith, though I don’t know if I could every be satisfied with atheism intellectually (and morally). I’m not really sure how I kept (or was kept) from walking away. It was in some ways a mysterious thing. It was not a rational experience, though to be sure, my mind and intellect were fully engaged. It was rather an experience rooted in a profoundly deep dissatisfaction and awareness of the meaninglessness of life. There was dissonance, to be sure, between what I knew and believed to be true about ultimate things (God, Christ, heaven, hell, judgment, grace, etc.) and the seeming reality of life around me.
So what did I learn? 1) Faith is sustained in community, though not dependent upon it. I made it through my near brush with apostasy entirely on my own; no one was with me in the battle. The community though was always there enacting the drama of emmanuel redeeming the world and us to himself every week.
2) Faith is a precarious thing; indeed a gift from God as scripture says.
@elderj
man – your experience is harrowing and enriching at the same time.
I relate.
I think “frightening” is def. the right word… I know Ehrman lost his faith over the theodicy issue – wondering how much of it was strictly intellectual and how much was… other things. I dunno what was happening in his life at the time.