Strength To Doubt Or Believe
From yesterday’s New York Times:
A new book of her letters, "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light," published by Doubleday, show her struggling for decades against disbelief. "If I ever become a saint," she wrote in one letter, "I will surely be one of `darkness.’ " … "I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe," wrote Flannery O’Connor, the Roman Catholic author whose stories traverse the landscape of 20th-century unbelief. "What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe."
Being proud of having the strength to resist religion in the face of social pressure is just as biased as being proud of having the strength to resist doubt in order to retain religion. Not everything is about your strength! Your beliefs should reflect the world out there, and not just inner qualities you want to show off. I will be proud of you if you can find the strength or weakeness, as the occasion demands, to just believe whatever the evidence supports. Hat tip to Chris Masse.
I start out very young being very confident that there is a God. I expect that because God does exist I will get a response. I get none and then rationalize this result to myself in order to reconcile the existence of God (which I still believe in) and the lack of response.
I had the opposite problem. I had no faith there was a God. But I got responses, and then had to rationalise out where they might be coming from.
Since I wasn't willing to put my complete trust in directives from an unknown source, but instead I insisted on judging the responses by my own best judgement, I eventually decided it didn't matter what the source was or whether it was connected to a god who made universes etc. As long as I judged I was getting better advice than I'd make for myself, it was worth paying attention to independent of the source. And that happened with fair consistency. When I rejected the godly responses it was consistently because I didn't want to be that good a person.
Suppose for a moment that to have any sort of spiritual experience (e.g., getting a response) requires faith. Faith comes first (that's the nature of it---believing without direct evidence), and the evidence comes second.I might have misrepresented myself. I start out very young being very confident that there is a God. I expect that because God does exist I will get a response. I get none and then rationalize this result to myself in order to reconcile the existence of God (which I still believe in) and the lack of response. In that situation I had a preference over belief. I wished to continue believing despite the evidence. It wasn't until over a decade later that I decided to honestly weight the evidence and see if I truly though it was most probable that God exists or merely wished to believe, and found that I didn't.