Believers, do you feel you need faith to get through the hard times and life in general?

Faith in what? Faith that I’ll get through? That I can do this? That is essential. (Sometimes it takes some convincing, though.)

Faith that things will get better? Yes, otherwise, I may as well curl up in the fetal position and give up. I go through life with a positive outlook. Not that everything is all rainbows and giggles, but it’s pretty decent and could definitely be way worse.

In other words (if you are religious) does your religion help you cope with certain things in life?

Do you mean in the God’s win-win world? If things get resolved then it’s a miracle “Hallelujah Praise the Lord”. If it does not then it’s God’s will his way of testing our faith and making us supposedly better people.
Faith in yourself definitely to have the resolve to get through but not in a god that does not care what really happens to you.

So is self delusion preferable to suffering the despair of facing up to reality?

I’m not religious in any regular sense, but I live a passionate life. While working in hospice I had patients that were greatly comforted by their religion.

In Haiti, there was a little girl, a crush wound victim. A dog team brought her in. She probably wasn’t going to make it, not with the facilities we had available. She wanted to be held. After I hit her with some morphine, I cradled her in my arms, and she quieted down. She asked me if she was going to heaven. I could barely hold it together. I told her all little girls go to heaven, that they wake up in God’s arms just like she was in mine. She went to sleep and died that night. I think religion and the belief in a higher power is extremely important to some people and I would never, ever take that away from them.

@basstrom188 Oh I agree faith in self is very important for anyone. I should have really specified that I was talking about religious faith.

I’m responding to the second formulation of your question (“does your religion help you cope with certain things in life?”), because the wording used in the question title is a poor fit for my religion. I’m a Zen Buddhist, and neither faith nor belief really figure into it.

Neither do consolation and comfort, for that matter. The message seems pretty bleak: Nothing lasts. Nothing has its own independent existence. There’s nothing but change, with everything being swept along together in the churning flow. This doesn’t constitute a belief so much as a basic observation.

This is discomfiting mostly because we are in varying degrees of denial about impermanence. We don’t give full consideration to the implications of this basic fact and live accordingly. So change is constantly catching us by surprise and leaving us disappointed, bereft, distressed.

Zen practice is about facing impermanence squarely, not trying to negotiate with the universe for special exemptions, and coming to not only accept it, but to see its necessity, even its beauty.

Well, no longer religious here, but I do miss the imaginary comfort I got from believing in a power higher than myself, who could maybe, actually help me. But he was too damn capricious and unpredictable to actually count on. So I gave it up.

I’m still doing just the same, with nothing but faith in myself.

Nope.