Restoring Faith After a Challenge to It

[Zazzy]

Having never had a god-belief, I'm very interested in how theists overcome challenges to their faith. I was reading this great poem by the incomparable Gerard Manley Hopkins (Irish monk poet, late 19th century):

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

and I felt very sad at his obvious pain and struggle with a faith that was really important to him (he only wrote about his God).

I really want to hear about problems with faith that were overcome and faith was restored, not about challenges that resulted in permanent loss of faith (although I imagine the former theists here might have had such challenges and had faith restored prior to becoming atheists).

Particularly: what was the problem? What challenged your faith? How did you resolve it and restore faith? Was there a difference in your faith after the resolved challenge?

I'd like to politely request that this stay on topic for at least a while, since I genuinely want to hear these stories.

[freedomfromforum]

@Zazzy,

I'd like to contribute to this thread but it seems that once the proverbial drain-plug was pulled from my faith tank, I just watched it run dry fast. I think I got lucky, considering some of the struggles I've read about where people are lingering upon their delusions caused by faith. I'll be watching this thread, and if I can think of any instances within my religious past where I felt like my waning faith had been restored, then I will gladly share.

[Minimalist]

I'm very interested in how theists overcome challenges to their faith.

[Kayenneh]

For me it truly was about belief. I wanted so much to have a guiding entity, someone that cared for me, listened to my prayers and ensued my well-being. I lost my faith in the church long before I became an atheist, but as a pantheist (or something very close to that) I was assured that there was a god and that he listened. In lack of better words, I'm really 'lucky'. I assumed that my good luck was my god answering my prayers, and that was what kept me going. I seriously thought that the church had gotten him wrong, but that I understood. So, in other words, when the church failed to support my belief, I got presumptuous and thought that since I had god on my side listening to my worries, nothing could harm me and I was right. Later on, when I finally abandoned the last shreds of any belief, I realized that it was all in my head and I still had the same 'luck' as before, without me attributing it to a deity. But yeah, a misguided sense of self-importance and stubborn belief is what got me through as a Christian.

[Captain Colostomy]

My mother just swapped her 'failed' UCC faith for batshit bonkers rapturism. If moderate christianity seems unwilling to scare you straight, the nutjobs can help you out. I guess sheep respond to spurs.

[Searching4truth]

For me, it was viewed as a challenge to strengthen my faith. I remembered the Bible verse that says ' the one who endures to the end will be saved. I was trying to be strong for god to please him. When I would pray until my ears bled and they went unanswered, it would shake my faith.... particularly when a friend of mine died of cancer. My faith never was the same and I became so obsessed with justifying it through scripture that I studied harder than I've ever studied before. I began cross-researching between various religious and 'worldly' texts and saw the lies and the brain washing but even then I denied it to the 'T' I became agnostic and kept the delusion that god was real, he just couldn't be defined within religion. He can't be put into in to a box I would say. Push came to shove and I continued researching. I am now an atheist and make no qualms about it. I realize some people need these beliefs or think they do our else they'd be crushed so I keep my opinions to myself unless I'm asked or I witness a believer spewing fallacious statements. I feel stronger than I ever was as a Christian and more free. I feel like every day I have, no matter what I'm going through is a irreplaceable gift. I will never turn back. If I spend my whole life in the wrong, and I come to those pearly gates, if god is as the Bible says, he won't deny me. if he does, I can't spend eternity in paradise knowing that people are eternally suffering.

[Airyaman]

It depends on how important faith is to a person, I suppose. I think part of the reason I was able to allow my natural skepticism to finally reign supreme in my life is that I really had no reason to believe in any gods.

[FallentoReason]

The way in which faith is restored is always through something called cognitive dissonance and it's effect on the mind. Basically, the individual holds a belief and when they encounter something that directly challenges that belief, they then have cognitive dissonance - confusion from holding two bits of information that contradict each other. There are two ways to resolve this: (1) to negate the incoming information as untrue. Thus, your original belief still stands. (2) to negate your current belief after seeing how it could be false. And I guess a third option: (3) to warp your belief to fit the newly found info.
(1) + (3) are how faith would be restored.

I'll show you (3) in action from my days as a Pentecostal Christian.

Particularly: what was the problem? What challenged your faith?

I believed in the Gospels literally and I kept being told that the saints who rose from the grave after Jesus was crucified (Matthew) were never documented by people in the city of Jerusalem.

How did you resolve it and restore faith?

I couldn't employ (1) because the historical silence on this point was too great to bear. So I opted for (3) after that discussion. My resolution was that it was an allegory for what would happen during the End Days. Thus, I could make sense of the new info *and* continue to believe.

Was there a difference in your faith after the resolved challenge?

I'd say most deconverts would agree with me in that you don't actually know it right then, but what just happened is that part of your faith has been chipped off. You might feel like your faith grew stronger, but it was *reason* that won that day. It was reason that herded my faith around into a logical spot of apparent non-contradiction. But the more this happens, the more absurdly shaped your belief gets moulded into by reason, until finally you realise that you can't rationally hold onto your belief anymore. Effectively (2) happens to the entirety of your belief. You negate *Christianity* and opt for atheism.

[Fruity]

When I was a child I experienced trauma. My mind blocked the memory, but not the pain. I prayed and begged for the god to help my heart feel better. I begged that I could lose fear and nightmares. When I was 18 I experienced trauma again, only worse and more humiliating. I cried with every ounce of energy I had left as I crawled into my home hoping my weak mother wouldn't find me. I reminded the god that he wasn't supposed to test us more than what we could take... But I felt alone. My faith was threatened.

Then I began to feel guilty for questioning the god. I thought... This is Satan's plan to make me stray. If I can overcome this, I will grow stronger than ever. If I remain faithful, certainly the god will notice. All of a sudden I felt like I was this powerful being that could win any war against the devil and that nothing could take me down. A horrible experience turned into a test that I had passed for a god who had chosen me for great things and knew I could handle anything. I was special. No fucking shit. I spent a major part of the following years serving the church in all gratitude.

Lucky for me 5 years later I went back to college and started using my brain.

[ThomM]

The question is What Type of challenge?

Once you realize that gods and religion are both human creations that are not based on anything that can be proven REAL - that is not a "Challenge to faith" that is " acceptance of reality".

A challenge to faith might be a loss of a loved one - or something that happens that does not appear "right" in the ways of your religious belief - of which you can generally decide that there is an Evil force in the religion that can be called responsible for it.

However - Santa Claus is not real - neither are gods or devils or angels - all creation of humans. Once you actually read the bible - and understand how inglorious and downright stupid it is - and how the claims of it being infallible are nonsense - and then realize that prayer has NO effect (All people die - not ONE prayer has EVER worked - even the christ supposedly died although it could not have) - THat is simply acceptance of reality.

SO when religion says to you that the earth is the center of the Universe - we KNOW that is false. When they claim Adam and EVE- that is a MYTH - not reality. THe talk of a great flood never happened. ANd the christ is - at best - an exaggeration - if not a total fraud.