Faith Experience
Last post I asked:
What exactly is an experience of faith? When have you experienced faith most powerfully?
Last discussion thread I distinguished faith as an experience from belief. One commenter mentioned that she wasn’t sure she could differentiate them.
Believers: So is faith primarily what you feel or experience when you think about your religious beliefs? Have you also had experiences of faith that don’t involve thinking about your beliefs?
Atheists and agnostics: Do you consider lack of faith to be part and parcel of your outlook or is there any non-doctrinal sense in which you consider yourself to have faith?
What exactly is an experience of faith? When have you experienced faith most powerfully?
Last discussion thread I distinguished faith as an experience from belief. One commenter mentioned that she wasn’t sure she could differentiate them.
Believers: So is faith primarily what you feel or experience when you think about your religious beliefs? Have you also had experiences of faith that don’t involve thinking about your beliefs?
Atheists and agnostics: Do you consider lack of faith to be part and parcel of your outlook or is there any non-doctrinal sense in which you consider yourself to have faith?
Posted by Paul at 10:54 PM Permalink
14 Comments:
maybe i am just bull headed.
Misti: Faith in what? Can you say anything more about the "grace to believe"?
Crystal: What sort of circumstances would suggest to you that God does or doesn't love you - or others?
so everyone has it in different degree. kinda hard to explain but i will venture.
you see some people with strong faith and they can go on and on with attending masses and so on. some carry their cross a whole lot better than others, etc. i base this on the 'grace' that they are given.
in my human mind of course, it does seem a little unfair. but who can we argue with. after all if we believe in a god, he has the right to do anything because we belong to him.
about faith and my personal experience. when there are things that seem to happen without a logical explanation (unless i want to go the extreme length of explaining events by scientific terms), i take it simply as an action allowed by god, a mini miracle so to say.
so i have had pockets of miracles throughout my life that cannot be explained. that is enough for me to think that they must come from god.
all in all, i am a shaky catholic. i mean i hold fast to many catholic beliefs but i am not a fervent church goer. could be due to my physical or even mental state. it takes a bit out of me physically to be in church because of various ailments. anyway i still go whenever i can. some remnants left from my conscience that says i should try.
You are correct to say that faith is a harder to talk about and nail down than is love. I don't think about faith that much. I know I have it though.
I was taken back by your comment that as a species human beings are "clearly dysfunctional". I suppose that is true. But compared to other species, we haven't been here on this earth that long. Plus, we are rather new at living in huge societies. We are still learning how to do it. It is kind of like "on the job training." The skills that may have served us well when we lived in small groups are inadequate or maybe inappropriate for living in huge societies. We are working on it though. I see our species as a work in progress. I think this is by design too. It is that "work" in which I have faith. I have faith that we are going to make it after all. I have faith that we will succeed, that eventually we will learn to live in peace with each other and our earth.
When good things happen to us it’s because God loves us (Crystal) or is gracing us because God has the right to do whatever God wants, even if it looks unfair (Misti). It would follow that when bad things happen to us, it’s because God doesn’t love us or is exercising the right to do whatever God wants in a way that happens to harm us.
To me, this sounds like a prescription for having an added burden in hard times – to believe that we suffer because God doesn’t love us or, at the least, God is indifferent or arbitrarily with respect to our well being.
Crystal, to me the last part of your comment points in a much different direction:
“Also, though, there's just a ‘feeling’ sometimes that he's paying attention or that he cares, irregarless of what's happening.”
Misti, in a way isn’t everything grace? Can anyone even account for what we’re all doing here?
SUSIEQ: Like you, I hope our species gets in gear to participate constructively and long term with the larger work of creation that brought us into being and to which we’ve been invited to play a role. My faith is in that larger work, process or being - that One in whom we live and move and have our being.
As to our particular species, it shows both signs of promise and self-destructiveness. I wouldn’t know how to call it – and to me, that doesn’t count for so much. It seems to me that what really matters is what we do with our time here, since that’s what opens up or closes off possibilities on the road ahead for the generations that will follow.
so in suffering, i offer up to god, because i think he has an ultimate plan.
and ya, why are we all here?
that's interesting. because of grace? that's interesting too.
you have a way of seeing everything very clearly. i am fuzzy. fuzzy misti. heh.
*hugs*
You hear that word "plan" a lot - God's plan, the divine plan... It may be that it's used a lot in the bible too, but I'm not sure. I know for sure the word "creation" is used prominently...
I believed faith comes in different levels depending on the person's spiritual growth.
SHAWIE: It's been that way for me too - my awareness of faith has deepened over time.
Faith strikes me as neither reasonable nor unreasonable but something that we experience in relation the genuine mystery of being here.
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