Each of us tend to believe, have faith, or take positions on something, but we always have tendencies to question even our dearest beliefs, faith, or positions at times. The purpose of this thread is to introspect and confess that which we doubt about our own beliefs, faith, or positions. It's sort of like "True Confessions" religious or philosophical style.

IOW, where do you believe the greatest weakness in what you believe is, even if your consider you belief or faith to be very strong?

I will hopefully start the ball rolling with my next post here. And, btw, there's no commenting on anyone else's "confession" unless you state your own first.

__________________
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

As some of you know, I'm a Jewish non-theist (not an atheist) who does not believe in a creator-god but who also doesn't feel that he somehow knows one does not exist. So what I'm going to do is to briefly post where my weakest positions are.

I think it is very hypothetically possible that energy/matter may have existed back into infinity, so the need for a creator-god doesn't seem to me to be necessary there. But there's one area that has mystified many scientists, including myself. How did life start and keep going?

I don't too much have a problem with the concept that amino acids, which occur randomly in nature, may have hit some sort of combination, with possibly something else as a catalyst, and life may have started. That's fine. But there's a big problem. This life will eventually die unless it reproduces and even simple cell division is hardly "simple". Even though the earliest cells may have been less complex than today's single-celled organisms, still a division of a cell would seemingly be still quite complex. For example, how would the dna split without eventually diminishing to almost nothing eventually? On top of that, why would that single-celled protozoa care what happens after it dies? It's dead. Why the desire to reproduce?

So it seems that if these first forms of life occurred merely by chance, then how do we explain this "desire"?



Another area of weakness in my non-theistic position deals with Torah itself-- not the text but the Laws. When one looks at these Laws objectively, many of them (although I wouldn't say all of them), make sense whether we're talking about health (such as with the kosher Laws and those dealing with cleanliness), concern for the environment with our many Laws in that area, political Laws that weakened the monarchy and eventually encouraged a movement towards democracy, resting (Sabbath Laws), etc.

Is all it just coincidental? I have my doubts.

__________________
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

God is the one thing I am sure of. Everything else has just been an influence, self taught, or was just taught to me since childhood.

I am not certain about the Bible anymore being the one and only true word of God. I know there are other scriptures that didn't make it in the Bible of the Christian, baptist faith. Or the Catholic faith, and I hear there are even books in the Orthodox Bibles that aren't in Christian bibles as well. So I don't know about the Bible anymore!

My brothers and sisters and I used to argue with our dad, before he died and before his mind went, that we didn't feel like we had to read the Bible anymore because we knew all of the stories, like we knew all of the fairy tales popularly told to children in the US.

__________________
When a man sleeps in his bed, his soul leaves him to soar above, each soul according to its own way.......
The Zohar

Hmmm....... I started questionning my faith when I was about 19. I still have questions about some things, such as: how is it possible to transcend the world and love it at the same time?

At the same time, I welcome the questions, because it's only after asking them that answers start to come to me. (Which makes sense, because once the question is formed, we start to listen instead of assuming we already know).

There's an old saying that goes "that which doesn't kill you just makes you stronger", so I can agree with what you're saying.

Matter of fact, I'll take it a step further by saying that one's religious and spiritual growth probably will stagnate if their attitude is that they know all the important answers. There's a story about Augustine where he was asked whether he knew the important answers to life, and he responded by saying that he wasn't even too certain what the questions were.

__________________
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

Although I am quite firm in my atheism, like Metis I cannot guarantee the non-existence of God.

But I am also quite human, and the tendency to lapse into religious or magical thinking, especially at times of great stress, is sometimes impossible to overcome completely. So, for example, I will find myself "praying," which is to say imploring (usually mentally) something outside of myself. I think we all do that, and I suspect that the more easily one gives in to that kind of thinking, the more likely one is to be religious. For my own part, it seems I recognize what I'm doing is futile, and so it doesn't last long, I don't develop expectations, and I don't develop religion.

But the doubt is still sometimes there....

__________________
evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

Thanks EH, I can very much appreciate your heart-felt feelings.

__________________
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

For me, my most vexing doubt-spot concerns the human mind. Magic has fascinated me from a very young age, and I want to believe that thoughts and feelings have some direct influence on the physical world.

Unfortunately, the physical world doesn't usually want to play along...

Actually there's some evidence it does. With certain experiments dealing with quantum mechanics, it seems that sometimes sub-atomic particles, including photons (light), actually may inter-react with our viewing.

In a classic experiment run several years ago and repeated many times sense, a laser beam was run through two holes spaced a relatively short distance apart and in a vacuum with the viewer off to the side. The viewers should actually not see the light shot through the holes, but they do. For reasons yet unexplained, there appears to be some inter-reaction between the viewer and the particles.

__________________
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

Very nice, pinski-- very nice.

__________________
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein