Losing one's religion

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
21

I wouldn’t quite class it as a step forward in something akin to the evolution of humanity.
Primarily because spituality is a neurological consequence that effectively leverages existential value in the only full sensory transitive comprehension known to humanity.

You can’t find a more efficient .zip compression for comminicating what your experience is articulated to me in my fullest comprehension.

Take any practice and you can, from it, understand what another human’s vantage in life was pretty comorehensively regardless of time.

22

I do not question the old explanations, they were as honest and sincere as the knowledge base of the times would allow. But there is a subtle difference between that which is spirituality and what is religion. Attending to our spirituality is the beginning, not the end of anything - including religion. In a sense, there is no such thing as losing religion. It simply becomes irrelevent as we continue to strip away the old mythologies. I would not deny the discomfort of standing naked before the universe without the reified security blanket of a god, but spirituality does not offer comfort, only mystery. Even our intuitive understanding of our own spiritual experience is being challenged. When we can insert a tiny wire into a specific region of the brain and when a miniscule electrical charge is introduced, promote the neurological experience of a “spiritual” state of being, have we not simply constructed another iteration of “god”? Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know…

If this is dragging the thread off topic, I apologize. I was simply questioning some of the assumptions being made.

23

The OP seems very sincere, but faith itself is intellectually dishonest. The idea of God the Creator is fundamental - one of those concepts; like epistemic legitimacy - that must necessarily occur in the course of intellectual evolution. Faith is epistemically illegitimate. I don’t know if God exists, and what’s more, I know I don’t know. Atheism is just another form of faith - and equally illegitimate.

24

So what is ‘epistemically legitimate’? And what is it, exactly, that legitimates your sense of epistemic legitimacy?

25

Hello Aly,

— No doubt about it. My point from the beginning was simply that there are countless crises of faith that could result from it, crises that we should confront and/or overcome prior to losing our faith in God.
O- I agree with you on that, BUT, the POE, in my opinion, has no solution, at least not a reasonable, rational solution.This is what I think Ehrman does wrong. You can win a logic contest about the POE. God had no real answer for Job, or to put it in another way, the author of that book did not arrive at a meaningful, rational, solution. But what he did show is the process of struggle. Job’s wife leaves her faith quite early while Job perseveres. But even he finds himself unable to cope with the POE. His friends try to rationalize the problem away, i.e. there is no problem but everything is as what is advertized…which of course implies that Job, not God, is the cause of Job’s suffering, the suffering of the innocent. Theat part Ehrman understands well, but what he does not is how the answer to Job calms Job at all. Was it weakness on Job’s part? I think that Job got no answer as to why he had to suffer but got something else instead, more valuable than any reasonable answer and that is a connection with the Almighty.
People, Saints, Prophets, have often mortified the flesh, voluntarily suffering, to gain that which is more valuable than comfort, which is an audience with God, or the feeling that you are before His presence. Afterwards people cannot really define it in reasonable terms, which is, I think, a difference between a mystical experience and a revelation.
So my belief is that part of his loss of faith was due to his feeling alone in the world. This world became a world of accidents and not purpose, not design. Job received the consolation that Ehrman did not which is that while single instances of suffering invade our serenity that it is still part of a purposely designed reality, designed with man in mind, by a being that loves man and even the man who suffers. Ehrman no longer felt (and I am just speculating here) the vibrant presence of a God. What if God had “spoken” to him? Addressed him from the center of a storm?

— Skipping over these live options and jumping straight to a rejection of God strikes me as, well, what did you say in the beginning? Lacking intellectual integrity? I am with you completely on that one.
O- Yet, I think, as I explained above, that the solution to the problem is not solved by intelligence; quite the contrary, it is exacerbated by human intelligence. Giving God the benefit of the doubt solves nothing, as it is still man’s reason trying to encircle the infinite, and what man giveth, man can also take away from himself. But the presence of God…?

— But what if this larger scale is undermined? Or what if God revokes our status as tselem Elohim?
Can we still expect our rightful reward if we, by which I mean humankind as a whole, have been fired or let go?
It is not a matter of personally deserving to be so, but deserving it in virtue of a communal failure.
O- Then there is no problem. Man has been “fired” so no reason for him to complain about suffering. But listen to Ezekiel:
"The word of the LORD came to me: 2 “What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:
“‘The parents eat sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge’?

3 “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. 4 For everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to me. The one who sins is the one who will die.
(and later)
“19 “Yet you ask, ‘Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?’ Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. 20 The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.”

Maybe you disagree with Ezekiel but it is this idea of God as a measured, rational judge that brought us the POE. It is what is assumed in the prologue of the book of Job, where God recognizes amply that Job is righteous and thus not deserving of suffering, regardless of what ALL the rest of humanity is like. This involvement by God in the lives of men, futhermore, marginalizes the idea that He has somehow forsaken, “fired” if you will, mankind so that there is no covenant with God. Rather there is, which is why God CAN call mankind into account as having sinned or not. If there is no pact, then God Himself has no reason to pester man, which is what montheists believe- God working in history.

— I don’t think I’m twisting the silence to suit my way of thinking. I think Abraham’s example makes it quite likely for Job to think that he is suffering because of a communal failure.
O- Ezekiel has God saying otherwise- that each man is responsible for his own suffering, or death. Think of Moses, how he sends his henchman to kill NOT everyone indiscriminantly, but those that deserved to die. Perhaps this is a lesson given to God by His prophet, the lowly Moses.

— The question is, what is happening in Abraham’s confrontation? No doubt a lot. But one thing is certain: Abraham is above all trying to justify the wickedness of the many with the righteousness of a few. He is trying to save the many because of a few. (Is the righteous man culpable given the wickedness of the many, or can he save them all from the ash heap because of his example? That is the question.)
O- Here is the situation: God meant to kill a village by a weapon of mass destruction. If the whole city deserve it then God is in the right, but if there is even one innocent among the victims, them God would have innocent blood in his hands. Here you see the seed of Ezekiel’s prose:
“Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare[e] the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
What Abraham is not doing is defending the wicked, or justifying the many because of the righteousness of the few. In fact the wicked are merely constrasted and differentiated from the righteous and the same fate shall not befall both. Once the righteous are out of town, including Lott, what does happen is what Abraham himself expected to happen which is that now ONLY the wicked received in measure what they deserve while the righteous receive in measure what they deserved. No POE here. No solution (answer) for Job either.

— (As for the Pauline reference I don’t see how it is an issue for my thinking. Indeed, blaming God for our faults as the potter is another live option in confronting the POE. I don’t think the audience is right in its argument though. We are not flawed. We are free.
O- Not in the context of the Potter story. A robot is free? Even our “liberty” is an illusion from design, which is to say, that the Potter fashions some pots for glory and others for destruction, and they, the pots, have no choice but to act accordingly.

26

I think that the question that arises in me is, what does a theist have to believe in? If a theism really is the belief in one God as the creator and ruler of the universe, without rejection of revelation, then I would have to reject theism too. Such a definition is too precise, making creative activity or rule the job of God, which may be true, but perhaps not. I think also that revelation is a case of recognition and making known the deeper truths of life, but I ask myself where such in-depth knowledge could come from.

Theism has for me always made use of the metaphor and the analogy to describe the otherwise ineffable, that which is experienced but not located, that which is present but not defined and always mystical. Theology has continued to play on words and speculate, building one speculation on another and forming dogmatic towers, whilst the original speculation (as far as we can make it out) seems to always be the best of all hypotheses, and all addition to that and further speculation only waters down the original intuitive awe or perverts it into “knowledge” or an “-ology” about which we can argue and decide what is “right”.

If Bart Ehrman has abandoned Theism, then probably because of the baggage (thanks tentative) that the word “God” has gathered. But he surely is then an atheist, unless it is as I suspect, that his identification with what he sees as required of a theist doesn’t stand up to what other theists expect of fellow theists and he doesn’t go the whole way into a-theism.

Take Care
Bob

27

I don’t think you quite grasped the concept.
This isn’t about old knowledge and new knowledge.

You still can’t convey your experience of life in full in any better method than to write your spirituality out in full and hand it to me, from which I would then devoutly take to heart and follow the tenants of so to grasp your experience of life.

28

No, I understood the question, but I’m much of the same perspective as Bob elucidated. I can tell you I have what we would call spiritual experiences, but it ends there. All my poor anologies are nothing but shadows of that experience and in no way would provide you any knowing of that experience no matter how earnestly we both tried to share and understand. I realize that we have nothing but words to share, but ineffable remains ineffable and mystery. We can discuss religion, but not spirituality any further than to acknowledge it’s presence in our lives. Few are those who can accept and be comfortable with ambiguity. Indeed, that discomfort is the seed of religion and gods, or at least it seems so to me. So to answer your method, there is none. I realize that this does nothing to satisfy the curiosity of either of us, but mystery is simply what it is. The fact that I would choose to not attempt to say, “it’s like”… doesn’t preclude me from saying what it isn’t, and what it isn’t a a good description of what religion is.

29

That is simply because you have not created your own fully articulated religion with which I then fully adopt in physical and emotional reverence.

30

Omar,

Few points.

  1. The POE is not solvable as you say. I agree. But I say this not because there is no rational solution but because there are many reasons or explanations. There are many ways that we will rationalize evil to ourselves and there are many reasons for why evil happens to us.

In the case of Job, it is not that God has no answer for Job. There is a clear answer for why Job suffers! The satan and God had a wager. They were testing Job’s fear of God. The fact that God didn’t give Job this answer (or an answer to the POE) is because it’s not what Job wanted an answer to! I think you see this though, for what you say Job gets in the end is a connection to the Almighty. I think you are mislead though. Job never loses his connection to God. (That Job’s fear of God is at stake is a red herring, or is what we are led to believe. What Job really loses a connection to is his station as humankind. (I think a deep, or the deepest question, in the book is whether fear of / commitment to God is enough. I don’t think it is. Fear of / commitment to humankind is also required, which is what Job has restored.))

  1. Explicit in 1, we need to distinguish between how we rationalize evil to ourselves and what the reason for the evil is. In the case of Job, the rationalization is that Job’s status as God’s image has been revoked. The reason is God’s testing him. To be clear, I’m not saying Job’s status/station has been revoked but that this is what Job believes. Hence I have no issue with your passages from Ezekial. None whatsoever. Job has not been let go by God (the righteous get fired on account of a communal failure) and the wicked reap what they sow.

  2. We need to be careful when we read intertextually. I’m not saying you have done anything wrong, but rather this is a word of caution. There are many responses to the POE, both rationalizations and reasons, and hence many consolations as well. It’s always a danger bringing in other texts, like Ezekial, Paul, or Abraham. Not to say we shouldn’t explore the connections, but I find it can be as dangerous as it is helpful, especially when dealing with a problem as complex as the POE.

  3. Let me clarify, I don’t think the righteousness of a few could ever justify the wickedness of many. If I said that what I meant was save. The righteous few can save the wicked many from the ash heap, not justify their evil. (Evil cannot be justified.) That’s what Abraham is discussing with God and is what Job believes he has discovered the answer to (i.e., no, a righteous few does not save the many. this perceived answer allows Job to rationalize the evil in his life–which is not to say that it is the reason for it).

31

Hmmm… I don’t quite know how to make it more clear. I have no religion, don’t want one, wouldn’t spend 30 seconds trying to create one. I have zero interest in why I’m here, I just am. The only questions I have interest is how shall we live? If that is what you mean by “articulated religion” then there is a basis for discussion, but it has nothing to do with our spiritual nature or experiences.

32

I wasn’t suggesting that you need a religion, or need to create one.
I was stating that it is not quite accurate to slide religion off to the side as lesser classed evolution of the human being than having no religion.
I simply pointed out that there is no other vehicle by which full adoption of every aspect of ones life can be transited from one person to another in ascription.

If you were to write a religion in full based on how you view life in every aspect, and if I were to adopt it in full devote reverence, then I would have adopted your comprehension through empathetic synthesis.

That said, I do indeed mean that how you view life in regards to what you devote to in reverence as what is your spiritual philosophy.
I toss it under the name of religion when in reference to establishing a methodology in which others may follow suit of the perspective philosophy in personal devotion.

33

Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge, and asks two basic questions: What can we know? and How can we know it? Applied to the question of the existence of God - there’s no legitimate justification for such a belief. We might reasonably hope that God exists, but to claim knowledge without foundation is dishonest. This applies equally to theists and atheists. Hopeful agnostic is the only legitimate position.

34

i dont understand why having faith in something is dishonest intellectually…what is so wrong with faith…

35

And what is it that legitimates your hope? Wouldn’t despair (or forlorn agnosticism) be equally legitimate?

36

And you’re still missing my point. In order to even gauge whether something is legitimate or not you need a legitimated standard. You have yet to indicate what that is. All you’re saying, really, is that all standards fail to meet this standard and therefore agnosticism is the only legitimate position.

But how can you say this unless you’ve legitimated the standard by which you’ve deemed nothing can achieve?

37

Hello Aly,

— 1. The POE is not solvable as you say. I agree. But I say this not because there is no rational solution but because there are many reasons or explanations. There are many ways that we will rationalize evil to ourselves and there are many reasons for why evil happens to us.
O- Yet in each and every case that is explained as you say, rationalize as you say, after examination, immediately ceases to be an evil and is better qualified as God’s justice. It would be an evil if ultimately the same fate waited the sinner and the righteous, to the authors of the Bible, or at the very least humanly incomprehensible.

— In the case of Job, it is not that God has no answer for Job. There is a clear answer for why Job suffers! The satan and God had a wager. They were testing Job’s fear of God.
O- Wife says to her husband: “Why do you treat me badly? I cook, I iron, and obey your every command.”
Husband replies: Well, my friend said that you probably did all that not because you love me but because you’re a gold digger."
Wife: “And you believe him!”
Husband: “No. I know that you love me!”
Wife: “And you thought it was right to torture the one you say you love all to impress a ‘friend’?”
Moral of the story: Such an answer would put into question the good moral character of the humband.

— I think you are mislead though. Job never loses his connection to God. (That Job’s fear of God is at stake is a red herring, or is what we are led to believe. What Job really loses a connection to is his station as humankind.)
O- Explain.

— 2. Implicit in 1, we need to distinguish between how we rationalize evil to ourselves and what the reason for the evil is. In the case of Job, the rationalization is that Job’s status as God’s image has been revoked.
O- That is your rationalization of the POE, but as all rationalizations, while they make us feel in control, they wilfully ignore facts. But I agree. The POE is often solve through sophistry or rationalizations.

— The reason is God’s testing him.
O- Again, God KNOWS, as God can only know, that Job is righteous, so his righteousness is not affected by any testing, so why torture the innocent? If Job’s moral status is in question THEN that would be a reason, but IMMEDIATELY it would cease to be an evil and more another justified move by God. Remember that Job had already retorted to his wife: “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” A test Job might have quite understood, and yet this was not his answer. His anguish is in that his suffering persists beyond the proof of his righteousness, meaning, that already Job had acted rightly at the provocations by Satan without losing faith. He begins to lose faith as the tribulations keep going despite his righteousness, so that his righteousness is of no use and he is served the same dinner as the sinners, so that now it is beyond his comprehension and he does not know what God wants, what pleases God, what is the measure of righteousness or even if being righteousness plays a part in our fate. If it is all the same to God then it is as if we had…no God. Where is the connection then, where is the meeting between man and his God? How is man to tell His presence? Thus Job calls upon God to grant him an audience, and there Job receives what cannot be put into words.

— I’m not saying Job’s status/station has been revoked but that this is what Job believes. Hence I have no issue with your passages from Ezekial. None whatsoever. Job has not been let go by God and the wicked reap what they sow.
O- You’re going to have to explain to me what you think exactly was going through Job’s mind, because I still don’t quite comprehend.

— 3. We need to be careful when we read intertextually. Again, there are many responses to the POE, both rationalizations and reasons. It’s always a danger bringing in other texts, like Ezekial, Paul, or Abraham. Not to say we shouldn’t explore, but I find it can be as dangerous as it is helpful, especially when dealing with such a problem as the POE.
O- You hit it. There are various responses to the POE recorded in the Bible. This is not evidence that there are reasons for the suffering of the innocent, but rather that the suffering of innocents has continiously generated human attempts at an explanation because man needs reasons for his suffering (so long as we have reasons, we have control, leverage, and can change or predict what will happen or is happening to us). That said the POE is intractable and eludes every effort, while still the nature of man, his intelligence, his definitions and conceptions, demand that such an explanation be available. The POE simply cannot be reconcille with the existence of God, so, for those who believe there is a problem and thus they seek, through these revelations to dissipate the POE, to explain it some how. The Bible is not all rossy, not all optimistic about the abilities of man to get to an answer, and so we have the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes and Paul of course.

— 4. Let me clarify, I don’t think the righteousness of a few could ever justify the wickedness of many. If I said that what I meant was save. The righteous few can save the wicked many from the ash heap, not justify their evil. (Evil cannot be justified.) That’s what Abraham is discussing with God and is what Job believes he has discovered the answer to (i.e., no, a righteous few does not save the many. this perceived answer allows Job to rationalize the evil in his life–which is not to say that it is the reason for it).
O- I still disagree with your assessment, but even if I accepted it as fact, it destroys itself as a “Christian argument” if that is what you hoped it would be, because it is the most basic assumption of Christianity that the Righteous One does indeed save the unrighteous many.

38

I don’t know about that. There is justice. There is God’s will. These aren’t the same. Not entirely. There is a plan for creation that goes deeper than justice. But yes, as a theist I would have to, in some way or another, see evil as arising within this context. Within the context of God’s plan or design of creation that is. Thus in the final analysis, yes, evil could be pinned on God, either on God’s will or God’s justice.

I would tend toward an anthropological origin of evil however. God willed humankind. Humankind brought evil into the world. Thus I don’t see God as responsible for evil. No more than the parent is culpable for the sins of the child or the child for the sins of the parent (as your Ezekial passage points out).

There is a period of infancy, yes, where the parent must take responsibility, but rearing a child is always going to be a risk. A balance between over-parenting and under-parenting. Letting the child learn on its own, the hard way, is sometimes the best way.

Hold up. You’re assuming God tests Job to “impress” the satan. Yes and no. God has faith in Job’s commitment, absolutely. The satan, however, does not. The satan in its wanderings on earth has developed a low opinion of humankind, one far from God’s own (that humankind is made in God’s image and deserves a crown). You have to imagine the satan showing up in God’s court in outright question of this belief. Thus God submits Job to the test to show the satan that there are human beings deserving of the name. So yes, it is to “impress” the satan. But it is not out of boastfulness that God does it.

I believe the book is designed to be read in two ways. The obvious way is that Job will struggle with his fear of God, or his commitment/faith or whatever you want to call it. As the satan says, “Job will curse You to Your face.”

The friends and God would then be understood as trying to put the fear of God back into Job, or as an effort to console Job and sustain his faith in God during his ordeal. This couldn’t be more obvious given God’s speeches at the end, where God speaks so overwhelmingly to Job and Job admits his smallness and “repents in dust and ashes.” God has succeeded at putting the fear of God back into Job (or has restored Job’s connection to God as you put it).

But there is another possibility! Job never loses faith in God at all but rather Job loses his fear of humankind, and it is this that God restores.

As I put it before, from Job’s perspective there are two conclusions when confronted by the breakdown of divine retribution: 1) God is an unfair master who does not pay what is deserved or 2) Job has been let go as a servant of God and therefore payment has ceased.

The first corresponds to Job’s fear of God being on the line, the second with Job’s fear of humankind. i.e., believing that he
has been let go is tantamount to believing in the worthlessness of humankind, or that humankind is not to be feared. As God’s speeches show, this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

That’s a quick explanation anyways. But I’ve said as much before.

Be careful. The test was that “Job would curse God to God’s face.” Thus the test isn’t over, and Job hasn’t proven a thing, until God confronts Job and Job shows he won’t curse God.

Job is asking “What is humankind?” and he has concluded “Not much”. Job once believed he was made and called to God’s image, that he was crowned in glory and honour. Now he believes he is worthless and destined to the ash heap. Job thinks he has been let go, that God has revoked his status/station as tselem elohim. This is what is going through Job’s mind. Or this is what is at the bottom of his lament.

To tie into the previous response, this is another way of phrasing it. Job thinks/laments that his righteous example has failed to save the rest. That humankind, righteous Job included, is destined to the ash heap. This is not true of course, but it is what Job believes.

I am in accord with the Christian belief. Job loses faith in it for awhile, given his treatment, but God restores Job’s faith in it in the end.

39

Hi alyoshka,

I don’t see a “wager” as a reason for suffering, but the fact that there is suffering and why should Job be an exception? The story is constructed to lead up to the storm in which Job’s basic assumptions about life, suffering and justice are questioned and Job is silent because he knows that God is right. Who can really question what happens? Nobody! Things are as they are and the wisdom of God is not fathomable which is why faith or trust is necessary. That should silence us all, but we do not hold the Ineffable in awe, but imagine we could understand, which is where the presumptions of the pious and their endless petitions come from.

Evil is something harmful which happens and which thereby questions our basic trust in life. Job and all humanity has the image of God, but when something happens that throws us completely, that is evil. A loss of loved ones in itself is something which we should – albeit with pain -, knowing what life is like, be able to contain without the loss of our faith. Evil is what endangers that faith. The wicked have no faith and sow evil to dispel the faith of others – and reap what they sow. But faith is something inherent in healthy life and not “belief” in some theological statement about God. The loss of faith is therefore something existentially threatening, something that takes away our humanity and makes us a threat instead of a blessing for the world. This is a basic truth which Christians today just haven’t grasped, but which they always connect to being a witness of God.

Take Care
Bob

40

Hi Bob, What you say here totally denies that we are made and called to image God. The book of Job does not call us to silence, but to speaking up. It does not teach us that God’s wisdom is unfathomable, but that human wisdom can rival God’s.

We are called to discern, and to equal/image God in our discernment. We are not called to succumb to the difficulty of discerning and to the conclusion of human smallness before God.

(As for the wager being a reason for Job’s suffering, it is and it isn’t. There is more to it than a wager. That is, there is a basis for the wager which we also must understand. God is trying to show the satan that humankind isn’t entirely bad, that God has good reason to appraise humankind as highly as God does. Job suffers to prove this to the satan. That is the more detailed reason for Job’s suffering.)

Evil is a tough reality to deal with. I don’t think evil is that which causes us to lose faith in God though. I think there is more to evil than that, and that there are things which can cause us to lose faith in God which are not evil.

For instance, things that cause us to lose faith in humankind would be evil as well. Also, Job’s testing by God is not evil, yet it is clearly designed to (potentially) cause him to lose faith. As evil as the test may seem it is done for good reasons, i.e., to restore (if it ever existed) the satan’s faith in humankind, that humankind can image God and is worthy of the crown that God has given it.