Board index ‹ Faith and Knowledge

[Newbie]

Christianity is the religion of the closed minds. Your faith forbids you to question your beliefs.

[jimwalton]

This is a serious misunderstanding of faith. Serious. I really don't understand where ideas like this come from. People in the Bible weren't excoriated for their questions, nor even for their doubts. If you read the Psalms, David is repeatedly yelling at God, questioning him, angry at him, expressing doubts. Read the 1st chapter of Habakkuk. It's filled with questioning. Questioning God is common from his people, and he welcomes their questions, and their doubts. There is a vast difference between the kind of doubt that spurns God and the kind of doubt that needs more understanding. Make that distinction as you read the Bible.

[Gargoyle]

True. I should clarify what i mean by questioning. I didn't mean questioning like "Why you did this?" I meant questioning like, "Is he really there?" "Why is that the other religion's doing's are strictly forbidden?" "Why there are so many contradictions between what we see and the Bible?" etc.

[jimwalton]

Again, I'll say that faith doesn't forbid such questioning. We all ask those questions, because they're valid. I've asked those questions many times. Such questioning makes us think, seek, investigate, and evaluate. We look at the world around us. It's fantastically beautiful, but sometimes ferociously harsh. It's filled with life, but also death. It seems imputed with so much purpose, but so much confusion. God can seem very obvious, but at the same time so absent. Is he really there? When I pray I can feel like I'm talking to ceiling, and at other times feel a spiritual connection with a veritable Presence. My prayers so often go unanswered, but other evidences seem so strong. Is he really there? When I see certain landscapes and vistas, or look into the night sky, my heart just about stops beating at the breathtaking majesty in front of me, and the small vulnerability of my personal triviality. At other times my innate sense of purpose and meaning shouts to me that I matter, my life counts, and there is both purpose and significance to every life. The universe is imbued with personality, purpose, goodness, beauty, and life. What's the source of that? Is he really there? We all ask these questions. Faith not only doesn't forbid them, but encourages them.

But then there are all these other religions. What's with that? Are they all equal paths in the quest for truth, or is truth restrictive? Can contradictory religions all be true? What makes me think mine is and theirs isn't? Why are the things they do forbidden, but the things I do sacred? Is it just perspectival bias, or is there evidence and truth behind my conclusions and convictions? These are fair questions, and any faith worth its salt will not shy away from them, but engage them with intellectual rigor, merciless assessment, and philosophical and theological objectivity. To close one's mind and refuse to examine the facts is an abhorrent hypocrisy.

But then I must also contend with the record of my faith and the shaper of my belief, the Bible. When I read it, it surges with vitality, amazement, truth and beauty. It feeds me and changes me. At the same time, the cultural and linguistic distance can make understanding it a formidable challenge. I don't see contradictions as you apparently do, but it has problem areas that take real thought and study. It's only fair to ask the questions that you do, and to treat the Bible with the same rigor, thoroughness, inquiry, and evaluation that we would any other document of its type. (After all, it's literature, not math or science, and should be evaluated on literary, philosophical, theological, historical, and cultural terms more so than as a scientific treatise. It still, however, is subject to the same criteria of truth and reliability as any text, whether scientific or the humanities.) Fundamentally, does the text correspond to reality and what we would define as verifiable truth? Faith never forbids these questions, but expects them. Truth that can't stand up to testing and verification is not truth but delusion.