Toughest Test of Faith

Reason.  The human intellect is, for me, the most difficult obstacle to overcome in my struggle with faith.  It's not the bad day, or the hard week, or the unlucky month, or the crappy year that can and does happen to anyone and everyone; no, it's my brain telling me what's logical, what makes sense, or what simply cannot be.  When one falls into the trap of asking "why?", then one can quickly start sinking into the mud of faithless human reason as his or her driving force.  The only way out of or around this is faith, the ability to accept things without knowing why. It's actually strikingly similar to trust, but I would differentiate the two as being either of this world (in the case of trust) versus not of this world, not of our direct personal physical experience (faith).  Trust can eventually be borne out, or demonstrated that one was correct or incorrect in the decision to place the trust in what it was placed; faith, on the other hand, will not be rewarded until after the death of the body.  That's what makes it so difficult:  we base our trust on the experiences and words of those communicated with by God in direct, intelligible ways, whereas we do not have that direct or intelligible experience.  There have been, perhaps, hundreds, or even thousands, who have had that type of experience, while there have been billions who have not.  So the odds are not good.  But don't ask "WHY would God do it this way?" or "HOW does He choose whom to communicate with, HOW to communicate, WHEN to communicate?"  It does not, it cannot, make sense to us.  The more I uncover in the history of faith in general as well as in my specific faith, the more questions I have, not the fewer.  My intellectual arrogance is tangible at times, and it is at these times that I (hopefully) catch myself and hit my spiritual RESET button by asking myself, who am I to question God?  It's a simple question, and unlike other faith-related questions, it has a simple answer:  I am who God made, and He created me to seek answers to questions that have none.  I freely and passionately accept and embrace that answer, as must everyone who has these types of questions.  If they do not, then their faith will not endure, they will live possibly happy and content lives, they will die, and they will cease to exist.  As irrational or superstitious or backward as it may seem to the rational faithless types, I choose to put my faith in an alternative ending, or shall I say beginning, to my existence, and I thank God for creating and instilling that faith in me!

Comments

[Sevda]

Hello;
I consider Jesus to be the Lord of the World. This is my faith. What is yours up to now after you have enough questioned? Do you believe that Moses really recieved 10 Commandments from God? Do you believe that Jesus really covered all the world's sin? Can our searches of the right answers break these principle laws of the God's life?
Thank you.

[worth]

Wow - you don't mince words, do you, Sevda? :)
I do believe that Moses received commandments from God, and that God wanted them shared directly with the Hebrews, and therefore had the words inscribed in stone somehow. Almost none of the people would have actually been able to read those words, as they could not read, but the words would have been read aloud to them.
I also believe that all, regardless of their sins, can enter the kingdom of Heaven (whatever that may be) through their faith in Jesus of Nazareth's life, death, and resurrection on earth, through their seeking forgiveness for those sins. And that this eternal life can only come through Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
It is not just our right, but it is our duty, to search for God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in the past and in the present. Not to prove or disprove anything, but so that we are doing all that we can do for our part in trying to know God, which is what God wants us to do. I have an occasional disagreement with a formerly Baptist, now non-denominational, friend over "faith and works," i.e. Catholics (like myself) believe that one reaches Heaven through both their faith and the way they live their life, while Protestants believe that faith alone is enough. What they don't quite grasp, however, is that if one truly does have that faith, then the works must necessarily follow; otherwise, the faith is not truly faith, but mere empty words in the vain hope that God will somehow be fooled. In other words, if one actually has faith in God, faith in Jesus, and believes and knows in their very being that Jesus is the Way the Truth and the Life, then one will live and act accordingly, as instructed by the teachings of Jesus, many of which are captured in the New Testament. So that, it is not through the works themselves that one gains entry, but through the faith that commands the works, which clearly must not exist if the works are not there to bear it out.
End of sermon. I hope you're not sorry you asked.

If I may ask, where do you stand regarding those same questions?

[krusty_da]

Hi, Im an atheist, and really find interesting the discussions about divinity.
About what you wrote on faith vs trust, I think the difference isnt only that trust is in this world, as I see it, you must win trust, I.E., you can lend money to a friend, because you trust him/her, you know this person. On the other hand, I think that you can have faith in this world too, faith being trust without a tangible reason to reaaly trust, as is lending money to a total stranger, or buying a lottery ticket. Well, thats what I wanted to comment :)
(sorry for the grammatical mistakes, I speak spanish)

[Tom Worth]

Krusty_da, you make a nice point about faith in this world. Thats not the kind of faith that I write about, but it clearly does exist. What really makes an even greater impression though, is your observation that trust is won or earned, while faith is not. Faith is just there, or it isnt.
Thanks for thinking and writing!

[bruce schultes]

Faith. The stuff that turns an argument into knowledge. Emanual Kant, Aristotle, Einstein all have said that you cannot prove cause from effect via inductive means. Knowledge is aquired subjectively when an individual "believes" an induction (argument).

There are no compelling arguments as the word "proof" would seem to suggest. All "proof" is subjective and its value is like beauty, entirely in the eye of the beholder.

Yet, with the illusion of absolute proof there is also an illusion of absolute truth even though we hear the statement - there is no such thing as absolute truth -no absolute truth as science proports ... theory only. Forget the previous violation of the law of non-contradiction ... But I say, even without absolute proof there is indeed absolute truth. You are just going to have to take my word for it.

Its just that truth is not dependant upon any demonstrations - well or ill formed. It depends on faith.

It all becomes a question of authority - a question of whom you will serve. You may choose to serve the partical physicists and the medical anthropologists or the geneticists ...

As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD (YHWH - Jesus Christ of Nazareth).

Reason is a great tool. Communication without logic is not possible. But we must understand - we all have come to the place of our current understanding by making great leaps. Statistical inference, Design of Experiment, Law of central Tendancy, Chi Squared ... prayer and fasting, Doxa and time in the scriptures, sudden revealing insights, revelation from God Himself.

All require that you believe someone outside your own skull. All worldviews are glued together by faith. I dare you to prove otherwise.