Ship of Fools: Faith and challenges to it

Thread: Faith and challenges to it Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :

It strikes me that the ability or willingness to integrate seemingly contradictory information into faith is what makes it stronger. It's not an intellectual process - for me - rather, it's a process of having experienced something that contradicts what I thought was true, and thought I knew as true, and revising, sometimes greatly, "truth" as I've known it.

I don't see this a "growth" thing - which has been the explanation conveyed by well meaning pastoral people - rather as having to dust off my damaged self and getting something more like post-injury physical therapy, a rehabilitation exercise program, and try to return to something toward pre-challenge functioning.

No longer do I accept that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, nor that God uses adversity to teach us valuable lessons. I'm wondering if others think differently or similarly, and whether others have experienced shifts in their thinking.

Posted by tclune (# 7959) on :

I have used the notion of faith getting "stronger" in the past, but I am no longer sure that it makes any sense. Faith seems more like a condition than a muscle. Where our faith is placed may change over time, and we may be more enthusiastic about things at some points than others. But I'm not sure the notion of a "strong" faith is particularly meaningful -- except, perhaps, to the folks in the faith biz. For them, it seems to mean something like people they can count on as troops in their professional lives are folks with strong "faith" -- they are reliably onboard with the particular faith biz program.

For the rest of us, if we no longer are all that hepped up about helping on the stewardship drive, it may just mean that our faith lies in a direction that is less useful to the pros, not that our faith has become "weak."

Or, we may see the world in a way that makes some grandfatherly sky pilot a less-than-compelling vision for us. That doesn't mean that we are foundering about in deep confusion, just that we aren't in synch with our grade-school Sunday school teacher's view of the world.

But the number of people who I've known who are paralyzed by the lack of confidence in some point of theology is precisely zero. Maybe your experience is different, but in my experience, when folks say that they lack faith they are saying something more like they have no interest in playing the game of the person inquiring about the state of their soul than that they are in the throes of some existential crisis.

--Tom Clune

Posted by que sais-je (# 17185) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:
It strikes me that the ability or willingness to integrate seemingly contradictory information into faith is what makes it stronger. It's not an intellectual process - for me - rather, it's a process of having experienced something that contradicts what I thought was true, and thought I knew as true, and revising, sometimes greatly, "truth" as I've known it.

I'd say this is true and applies more generally than to religious faith. I'm a pragmatist in the Jamesian sense of seeing truth as often being more about value than some abstract 'correspondence with the state of the universe'. We get out of bed in the morning for reasons that are important to us as living people not because of concepts to which we give intellectual assent.

Some shipmates don't like this idea but I'd say most of us have lots of different sorts of truths in our minds. And some are contradictory. Over time, if we're lucky, the best truths become lived experience, the others are slowly shifted into our mental spare rooms. 'They might come in useful one day', we think because we aren't brave enough to accept we should have dumped them years ago!

quote:
from Tom Clune
when folks say that they lack faith they are saying something more like they have no interest in playing the game of the person inquiring about the state of their soul than that they are in the throes of some existential crisis

... or on SoF they may be trying to start a new game.

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