What helps maintain your belief in God?

I have been near that line many times, I question my faith pretty critically at times. I think the experience I feel when worshiping is the biggest help. The feeling of His presence.

Whats the feeling like? I’ve never felt this feeling, I’ve prayed, came close to begging. It seems like some people get a “divine sign” and some people just die early.

@Moegitto It’s just a warm feeling coming over me. I can feel it settling down from the head to my feet. I can just feel Him. Not sure how to explain it any more than this. Hope it helps!

Which God are you speaking of? Yours or mine?

psssst… the G you seek can’t be contained by any of your available choices

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies I hope it is both of ours, but if not, I’m speaking of mine. Sorry….lol.

Can you define your God and give two examples?

my God is the presented through the Bible. Some call him Yahweh or the Almighty or Eloi. What do you mean by examples? Examples of what?

He was talking about two examples of feeling His presence.

@Moegitto to answer your question. No matter what we feel it’s gonna be different that what you feel. It can be about the same but it’s not because everyone feels different. You have to make your own choice or else later if you find yourself in a tight situation you’ll just blame the one who gave you the advice.
And remember God won’t be inclined to show you an obvious divine sign. You have to look carefully in your life because the response might have been given to you already.
Do not think for a second that God will be impressed by the amount of time you spend praying or how much or how good you beg. Others did it before you and will do it after you too. And if you pray just for that then be sure you won’t get an answer because you cannot manipulate God to show signs whenever they suit you. I have to wonder how much have you prayed before going in this situation and how much time you spent doing it. [and I’m not talking about only requests I wanna know how much you praised, worshiped God ?]

I was in your shoes but I knew those feelings will come and go and I knew they won’t last if I continued my normal schedule and they passed away.
If you are looking for a reason to stop believing then my friend you ask the wrong question here.

If you mean examples of feeling God’s presence, I feel Him during Sunday morning worship. When I get into praise, I can feel His presence come over me. Other times that I have felt Him are when I am watching something beautiful. Through my love for photography, I find myself taking many nature walks or trying to find spectacular landscapes. Many times at the culmination of these journeys, I can feel God’s presence in the silence, stillness, and complexity of nature.

I hold on to my faith because the alternative seems worse. I cannot arrogantly assume that man is the highest and only form of life there is; that would be a piss poor example if it was. Traits man has such as empathy, compassion, forgiveness, morality, sympathy, regret, remorse, etc would basically be non-existence if not the force and present of God instilling such in man. We would be no better than animals, doing what we do for out own survival caring not of any group or creature that got in the way, and no remorse for vanquishing them out of the way also.

There was too much to ignore piling up on one side of the line for me, when I came to this choice. I had no hard evidence to prove or disprove, but then I thought that it couldn’t work in that way. If the absence of evidence wasn’t the evidence of absence, then every god I learned of had to have an equal shot at my vote(s). People said before the universe existed, there must have been something that always existed to have created it. I wondered why if there could have been a being that always existed, why can’t the universe have always existed?

The thing that really got under my skin was that if someone didn’t know of the existence of the one true god, they went to heaven regardless, because they did not have the “correct” choice as an option. That would mean if I was to never tell my children about this god, they would go to heaven guaranteed, free to worship him for eternity. If I truly loved my children, I wouldn’t tell them, and simply raise them on the principles the religion was built upon. Because in the long run, telling them only gives a chance of going to hell/purgatory/being left behind etc. If every person in the world stopped speaking of the true god, we’d all be better off, because we would all go to heaven together.

It all made too little sense, even before I tried comparing things to scientific “proof”. My religious legs had been crippled by my own logic and thirst for more knowledge and opinions on the way we view life. I hope this helps you see which side I fell onto and why, so that you can avoid tripping up at the same spot, if that is your wish.

“If gods are a security blanket, then are we who don’t believe cold? Not that being warm, cozy and sheltering one from another’s truth allows you to say who needs some faith.”

Ha!

Becasue every time I have prayed for faith, I have found it.

I’ve experienced the same ack of divine fulfillment that @Moegitto talks about.

I have twice let go of everything, opened my heart, and prayed for Jesus Christ to take up permanent residence there. After each experience I felt absolutely nothing. I walked the walk and talked the talk for a while but in the end it felt like empty playacting. That’s when I began to look a little more closely at the Bible and the many inconsistencies within. I realized that the book was more of a sales tactic than a divine document.

I still think that the central message of Christianity is a sound one. Love one another, treat others as you’d like to be treated, go out of your way to help one another and those in need, these are all great ideas to work in to your life. I don’t see the need to wait for a burning bush or a voice from the clouds to implement them.

Long ago, I was a devoted Christian, then after reading closely and having science pull too much evidence towards the other end, I saw the Christians change their story to “the bible isn’t a book of truths, but a book of lessons”. Then I saw (we all did) preachers, ministers, and fathers do the very same thing they preach against. Then I experienced first hand by my friends parents (who the father was a minister) refused to let me stay with them for 4 days until I could get my apartment set up, leaving me homeless for 4 months. Thats when I began to SERIOUSLY question religion. Maybe I was studying the wrong path or maybe there was a religion out there that was for me. But 80% of all religions either branch from or have some sort of common state as Christianity. Thats where I feel into my current thought thesis, If I can’t get help from one “source”, then I’ll only depend on myself.

I went through something similar, but my conclusion was that I had been looking at the wrong examples. We are expected to use Jesus as our example, not other people, not the church, or even the Church, or any other human or human institution.

@Moegitto but remember when you depend only on yourself it’s bad. If you are alone there’s no one to help you when you are in a bad spot or to help when you fall.

I really don’t know, it’s just always there. There are times when I question my faith but I can never quite shake it off.

The unexamined faith is no faith at all.

@CaptainHarley Then whats the point of going to church? Why go to a building to worship when I can stay at home and read the bible?

As iron sharpens iron. You’re supposed to critically scrutinize your faith all the time.

@Moegitto

I have no idea. The original “church” was someone’s home who just wanted to be with their fellow believers. Go figure.

I believe in Yog-Sothoth because to not believe in Him is patently absurd. I have books telling of His infinite power and wisdom, and everything I see in the universe attests to His existence. I hope no one will mind my quoting holy scripture when I say that Yog-Sothoth is the “All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self—not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence’s whole unbounded sweep—the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike.”

The universe must have a being like that in it. It just makes so much sense. Besides, my prayers to Yog-Sothoth are never answered—which is exactly what I should expect from a deity so intent on reminding humans how unimportant they are on the cosmic scale. Seriously: I pray for a pony, nothing; I pray for my grandmother to survive breast cancer, nothing; I pray for an end to world hunger, nothing. How many times does something have to happen before I stop calling it a coincidence and realize it’s Yog-Sothoth trying to give me a sign?

@Hypocrisy_Central Atheists don’t have to assume that they are the highest and only form of life there is. For one thing, “highest form of life” doesn’t make sense in evolutionary terms because evolution isn’t linear or hierarchical. Second, everyone knows there are other forms of life. Amoebas, tulips, cows—they’re all life. And if you meant “intelligent life,” atheists don’t have to say there can’t be other intelligent life out in the universe somewhere. Most, in fact, seem to think that there is such a thing (even if it’s too far away for us to contact). There are also evolutionary explanations for empathy, compassion, etc.; and there are philosophical justifications for them, too. Even if those were bad, though, it just doesn’t make sense to live certain ways that people call immoral. It’s boring, tiring, and not worth the risk of pissing others off. So even if weren’t immoral, we still wouldn’t be common behavior.

I maintain my faith by loving the world around me, and being thankful whether it loves me back or not.

I think I’m just gonna take the intelligent route and go Atheist. Feel better having something I believe in.

Why would you call that the “intelligent” route?

Because he thinks it will irritate those who believe. : )

@Moegitto I’m just happy you’re happy! @Uberwench I believe in Yog-Sothoth too. But I call Him by a different name!

I call it the intelligent route because there is no reason trying to put my faith and heart into something that I know I can’t. For some people the belief in one specific religion comes natural and seems easier to do than believing in another religion (Christianity vs. Muslims). But if I have no faith whatsoever why should I continue to claim Christianity?

That’s the problem @Moegitto. Claiming Christianity is erroneous. Christianity is not God. No religion is. Especially Atheism. Atheism is not something to “believe in”. It’s simply a world view. And it’s just as incomplete as every other world view, or religion.

While you’re dancing around trying to decide which party to attend, the big guy upstairs is looking down wondering why you refuse to have a direct relationship with him, rather than muddling through the protocols of dogma.

LOL @ muddling through the protocols of dogma. I like that!

Atheism isn’t a world view, it’s an applied theory based on the science of fact. There’s more( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism) than one type of atheism practice. That type is what I’ve been researching when “I” refer to athesim. Christianity and other said religions are also based their own theories too, but each religion has a different way of explaining it. When the bible was first written it was said to have been stories of truth, now they say all the stories are lessons. People use the bible everyday to gain some sort of attention profit like the D-bag that was saying the bible said the world would end in May, and now he say’s it says the world will end in October.

@Moegitto, you don’t think atheism is part of a worldview?

What facts do you speak of when claiming “science of fact” about atheism? @Moegitto

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html Didn’t want to post a long and boring article, but there’s one. The Science of Fact is what scientist use when the start a theory. It goes from a Thought to a ideation to a process and then if all is well to a conclusion. the Conclusion is your proof.It’s just a big term for another type of equation.

Are you honestly suggesting that the theory of evolution is a fact which disproves the existence of a god?

You do understand that scientifically educated theists have no problem with accepting the theory of evolution… don’t you? There is not much to debate on that issue in terms of if it happens or not. Primate olfactory genes have been discovered in human pseudogenes. They’re just turned off. Debate settled, humans arose from primates.

The debate is not if it happens. The debate is how it happens. And more importantly, nothing about evolution speaks to the subject of Origins. Your TalkOrigins web friends become ghostly silent on that subject. Unless of course they can trick you into accepting Abiogenesis as a fact. That’s going to be difficult, for even the most notable Abiogenesis proponents have rejected that pseudo science.
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You’re somewhat new here @Moegitto. You probably don’t know much about the lengthy debates that used to take place on this forum concerning Theism and Atheism. I’m not going to rehash the thousands of comments here. But I will leave you with one of the many scientific reasons for my faith in an all powerful creator. Something to chew on and ask your TalkOrigin buddies about. Watch as their apparent intelligence on the subject runs for the shadows when you mention this to them.

In the most simplistic terms:

DNA is a code.
All codes have sentient authors.

Who wrote it?

“Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor)” I really enjoyed this line the most! Some evolutionists make that claim all the time and then proceed to attack religious folk falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favour!

Why hasn’t anyone been able to make an experiment that creates life ex nihilo?

Well the Miller-Urey Experiment is often touted as an experiment that creates life. But that’s just the creation of organic compounds from inorganic compounds. A far cry from living organisms.

What helps me maintain my belief in God?

The complete lack of any belief thereof; that maintains things pretty neatly.
It’s a “blessing” really… :D

To believe in disbelief is unbelievably believable @everephebe.