I´m losing my faith ...

Joined : 01 Jun 2007 Posts : 91

Mostly, I have been a lot of dificulty with some stories on the book of Genesis, specially the flood. was the flood universal ? if it was so, how many years ago has it happened then ? I have never really read this story because I never really dared to read Genesis entirely, as I knew It would chock my beliefs. I COMPLETELY DISBELIEVE A 5000 OLD EARTH. and I just cannot imagine a american saying he believes such, believing such is a 3rd world behaviour, I live in the 3rd world, not you Very Happy

anyways, I have always tought the creation as related on Genesis as a poetic story of the actual process of creation. but the story of the flood ( which I have never read before ) sounds absolutely abusrd to me. at least the concept of a complete earthly flood. so are we ALL, chinese, german , black , europeans, latinos, italians, etc, descendents of Noah ? the only way The Flood of the bible could be a true story of some 5000 years ago would be if God decided to create the human race again, and this "new creation" is not described on the bible. the differentiation of races take many many years, if this flood had killed everyone a new creation would be needed for mankind to have the diversity of races we have nowadays. or this flood maybe happened then like some 20000 years ago or much more. again I don´t believe in a 6000 years old earth, I believe its a joke anyone who says that believe in our planet as young as that. any scientists would laugh at you if you said such. besides , it would be needed a new creation of animals for the "unversal flood" to be a true story ... or the flood was not universal ... but the bible says all flesh that was in dry land perished. waht can you say to me about this. besides this fact, for some stuff that have been happening to me recently, I think I can say I completely believe in God, and also in chackras and aura ( do any Christians you know believe that ? ) and God certainly exists, but maybe he´s not the God of the bible. you know, let me say that, if the story of the flood isn´t true than the bible isn´t true and I am in a complete crisi, please someone help me if you can

Thanks for that.

Age : 20 Joined : 21 Jul 2007 Posts : 2022

Joined : 18 Jul 2007 Posts : 154

I honestly can't offer much except to say,if you think ,really think about the world around you there is a lot of corruption.I have read some articles where it was made clear that a certain percentage of scientists actually desire to destroy the idea of creation and think anyone inferior who believes it.On the other hand,science cannot give any truly logical theory on how life began.No matter what is presented as a theory it always comes back to "so where did that come from"My point is ,no matter who says it,don't blindly accept all of the "scientific evidence".It has been proven many times that some of this so-called "evidence" wasn't right or in some cases was made up.Thats all I can offer,God Bless, hang in there,we all have doubts and sometimes those doubts make our faith stronger!
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."He kills for sport or lust or greed,Yea he will murder his brother to posess his brother's land"..............."You'll have to prove to me that what I say is a lie,cause all I see is hatred splashed before my eyes".............."Judgement has been written,fire has been foretold,in the distance Sodom burning,reaped what they have sown"..............

Age : 20 Joined : 21 Jul 2007 Posts : 2022

Steve, I agree with you 100% Excellent post! It's always important to examin our sources of information. I guess the whole corruption thing, and lack of a logical theory on how life began is why I don't really have a grounded belief about the afterlife. A lot of arguments I see for God's existence could just as easily be used to prove the existence of some other entity that is completely different from the Christian concept of God, or that is completely different from what we are looking for, if there is anything at all. I guess I've come to accept that I just don't know, and I don't believe that there is enough evidence for everyone to be expected to accept an ultimate Truth and be held accountable for it. I think we all do our best with what we have to make sense of the world around us. Sometimes that involves another life and sometimes it doesn't. I know that I am more focused on trying to make the best of what is in front of me, and the life that I know for sure that I have, if that makes sense.
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Subject: Re: I´m losing my faith ... Mon Jul 30, 2007 4:59 pm

I think what GP had to say was good stuff.

No offense offerred here but if your 'faith' is falling apart because you are questioning how you now view Genesis..

Then perhaps what you previously recognized as 'faith' was not really such or not really faith in the Lord. I certainly could be wrong about that. I understand that some people recognize fundamental doctrines as a benchmark of 'having faith' and feel if they question these or decide intellectually those things are false, they have lost 'faith'.

I've changed how I view various Scriptures over a 20 yr period but finding certain passages difficult or what have you didn't disrupt or dislodge faith itself.
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only symbols can be twisted ,burned,spat on etc.NOTHING truly Holy can be desecrated.....

Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity

Joined : 01 Jun 2007 Posts : 91

Well, its not only the Genesis stuff. actually. people here where I live always demonize stuff like acunpunture , aura , chackras and new age beliefs. one day I decided to try "meditation" techniques. guess what ... the result is very similar to what I feel as anoiting of the Holy Spirit. besides that , after I started questioning , I felt this anoiting from God becoming weaker ( but its still present ). Its too hard for me to accept a concept of a eternal hell for people that haven´t even heard about the gospel once in their lives. I am in a crisis that´s it. a crisis of faith. I never believed the creation on Genesis to be literal. however, before converting to protestant Christianity, I actually believed that the Noah´s Ark story was a popular myth , not a story from the bible. and I avoided reading Genesis as mentioned above, as swepping things under the rug to not confront them. but a friend of mine told me about the flood and I decided to read. many people say about theories about the partial flood , however a universal flood JUST DON´T make sense to me. at least not scientifically speaking. there should be a new creation of the human sapiens sapiens ofr it to be true ...

Age : 22 Joined : 04 Jun 2007 Posts : 1477

I can relate 100% to what you are saying, Zze, as well as you GP. I too had the "unraveling" experience ... one passage I could not accept ... and all the others followed suit.

I will say to you Zze, take what you can from people that respond to this, but at the end of the day do what you feel is right for you. There's no telling where your life will lead you. Perhaps setting aside your faith for now is going to end up turning you back towards faith, years from now.

Personally, I fell away from Christianity about 4 years ago now, and I am jsut now reaching a point where I am considering picking it up again. I don't know if you are younger or older than me, so all I can offer is my own experience, but I know that in the last 4 years I have been all over the place. Up, down ... on top of the world ... and at the end of my rope. Life is crazy.

The fact that you believe in God is positive, though. I'm not saying you have to be a Christian (obviously), but something that kept me going was finding a way, PERSONALLY, and not related to any church, bible, or doctrine, but to PERSONALLY decide why I believed in God. This has stuck with me for these 4 years and I am grateful for that.

And now I am slowly but surely finding more reasons to believe in spirituality again. Don't push it. Let your life show you. As GP said, getting past the emotional reaction of "well, what the heck do I do now" is a difficult stage. But once you get past that, you can look at the world differently and begin to see things for what they really are.

Just my two.

Keep us updated man.
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... a chill rises from the soil ...
... and contaminates the air ...
... suddenly ...
... life has new meaning ...

Joined : 01 Jun 2007 Posts : 91

Oh, and I suffer from some type of Fribromyalgia / Chronic Fatiqgue Syndrome. I feel pain on the points of the Chackras Often. and with meditation/anoiting , besides of feeling relief of symptoms ( temporary relief, that´s it, but there´s relief ) I feel the chackras like "glowing" specially the so called "Crown Chackra". and don´t tell me its "daemoniac stuff because I felt it when praying to God too. but Chackras for many Christians are demoniac concepts as they come from eastern religions. what do you think about Chackras, Aura and Acunpunture ?

Age : 22 Joined : 04 Jun 2007 Posts : 1477

No offense Zze but no one here is going to judge you for this stuff. You don't have to worry about being called daemoniac ... you've got to worry about that enough in your day-to-day life I'm sure. We've all been there.

The chakra stuff. I definetely believe in chakras, through my own experiences with meditation. I (personally) don't see what's so demonic about that.

Acupuncture ... I know what it is but have never tried it.

Describe this "aura" thing a little bit. I looked it up on Wikipedia to
get some basic information on it and I think I get the general concept.
But what are you talking about when you refer to it?

People will tell you all sorts of things. If your church is demonizing you, then you should move on from them. They are tearing you down rather than building you up, and that is far from the purpose of a church.
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... a chill rises from the soil ...
... and contaminates the air ...
... suddenly ...
... life has new meaning ...

Age : 20 Joined : 21 Jul 2007 Posts : 2022

oooh, these things really interest me. I generally feel that different spiritual practices, including those you mentioned work for different people. If you feel you are experiencing a positive effect from them I would encourage to you to explore it more. Also, I don't think that Christianity is entirely opposed to eastern ideas. When I was a Christian I actively explored meditation techniques and ideas behind chakras. What I can most relate to is how you said that the "feeling" of the Holy Spirit was the same in these practices, or something similar. I have definitely had that experience, which has led me to consider that maybe we all experience similar feelings to spiritual practices that "click" or "work for us as individuals, and we attribute that to different gods or faiths or rituals. I really don't know though, as it was just an idea I had that seemed to make sense and account for the wide diversity of spiritual experiences.
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Age : 22 Joined : 04 Jun 2007 Posts : 1477

Joined : 13 Apr 2007 Posts : 932

Joined : 01 Jun 2007 Posts : 91

Oh yeah. for that matter I still consider myself as a Christian. but this crisis has started months ago with me actually. I started joining new age communities on Orkut. but stopped for a while. Then I started doing a lot of research about the flood stuff on internet and I discovered that most Christians blantanly deny the idea of a partial flood. and, basically, the bible would deny such as well. so let´s say "my" Christianity is too unorthodox ... believeing in partial flood, NOT beliveing in a 6000 year land in any form , shape or type ( NO, THANKS ) and also beliveing in aura and chackras ... beliefs that are demonized by many Christians as many demonize eastern religions ... plus the questions about hell and of course, last but not least "secular music" issues ( which is a hard issue for , no matter what ) are leding to a point of questioning my faith in a basis Ive never done before. I have always believed in stories like Lazarus Ressurrection and The Opening of the Red Sea as true , but the flood is nothing something minute ... the 2 storeies I mentioned earlier cannot be "proven" by science, BUT THEY CANNOT BE DISPROVEN as well ... none can say that "lazarus has never ressurrected, we have a proof of that on this document" but denying widely accepted theories of our planet´s geological history with completely illogical stories like the flood is something very confusing to my head. and if the bible is the inerrant inspired word of God and I cannot believe in the flood, I just cannot believe in the word of God as a whole, that´s why I am doing a lot of research on this subject.

Age : 78 Joined : 21 Apr 2007 Posts : 1509

Thanks for sharing your story Zze. There are a lot of similarities between your story and my experience.

Without trying to sound "preachy", here are a few thoughts...

First, doubting or having questions about different aspects of our faith is completely different than "losing" our faith. I think what's hard for some of us, and I include myself here as it relates to how I was raised in the church, is that we're taught that we shouldn't question our faith. "God said it, I believe it" is sort of the slogan used in this regard. So then when people do have questions, they're led to believe that questions are a bad thing; they show doubt.

God is bigger than any question or doubt that we might have. Don't worry too much about questions. Questions are how we grow in our faith. If we didn't doubt/question things, we wouldn't get anywhere. We wouldn't grow in our knowledge of the Lord and his Word and our relationship with him and the world.

Keep seeking and you will find... The difficulty is that we generally seek what we *want* to find, we look for things that confirm our current beliefs or what we hope is true. Don't be afraid of finding something that is maybe a little different than what we might have expected.

Having doubts about a particular interpretation of Genesis is so far away from doubting your faith in God. Be sure that you never confuse those two issues. You said this:

Subject: Re: I´m losing my faith ... Mon Jul 30, 2007 7:11 pm

awesome post Shred Smile

_________________
only symbols can be twisted ,burned,spat on etc.NOTHING truly Holy can be desecrated.....

Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity

Joined : 18 Jul 2007 Posts : 154

Another thing to remember Z, is that like so many other things in our life,faith is a choice.That is the awesome thing about God,even though Glass has made some interesting points,in the end it really doesn't matter, what to our understanding God is,only that He is.Take for example the recent Da Vinci controversy,some may call me close minded but I rejected the core idea of it completely.I am confident in my faith that it is wrong ,but also I choose to believe its wrong.I have no time for a" dirt messiah". who didn't resist temptation and is no diff.than Fred down the street.For me,my choice ,I choose to believe in a God,a divine Messiah that is above and beyond the pitiful cruelty and abuse that men wreak upon each other and knows the answers of the great mysteries of the universe.The story of Christ was God's example of how infinite his love and his mercy is.You can ask questions,you can have doubts,you can even curse his name,and still he will forgive you!That is my God,and that is the God I want to praise and speak of.You need no religion ,no priest,no rituals,you need only ask and believe.
_________________
."He kills for sport or lust or greed,Yea he will murder his brother to posess his brother's land"..............."You'll have to prove to me that what I say is a lie,cause all I see is hatred splashed before my eyes".............."Judgement has been written,fire has been foretold,in the distance Sodom burning,reaped what they have sown"..............

Subject: Re: I´m losing my faith ... Mon Jul 30, 2007 8:23 pm

Play it LOUD!! Age : 51 Joined : 06 Jan 2007 Posts : 11665

Points:

1. This is a good thread. flower

Sadly I don't have time to read it thoroughly as i'm limited for time right now. But I will come back to this.......as this thread rocks......I can tell that just by skimming it quickly.

2. Zze said:

Age : 33 Joined : 06 Apr 2007 Posts : 2366

Don't sweat your understanding of the Flood narrative or other difficult passages of Scripture. There are many godly people out there who've done the best they can to understand the scope of the Flood and sincerely believe that it was localized and not global. I'm certainly in that camp.

At the end of the day, my faith is in Christ alone to save me. My views on who wrote what book of the Bible, how to interpret certain passages, will be meaningless at that point. It's Christ's blood that saves us, not how well or how correctly we understand and interpret Scripture.

Remember, while Scripture is important, we don't worship the Bible. Instead, we worship God who wrote it first and foremost. Throughout our lives, we can study Scripture, read every interpretation of it, and personally still remain undecided as to some of its meaning. That's okay. That doesn't make you a lesser Christian. Read the Psalms. They're filled with moments of doubt and uncertainty about life and God. They show us that those times will come and go hand in hand with living in a fallen world. I think your faith has been shaken up a bit, but it doesn't sound to me like you've lost it completely.

Subject: Re: I´m losing my faith ... Mon Jul 30, 2007 11:35 pm

Excellent post, Scourge, and this sums it up for me, right here: