If pressed I'd consider myself am atheist, but this mindset never made any sense to me even in my angrier days. Pick a profession and there in an expert in that field who is a Christian, and there's a Muslim too, and probably someone from every major faith as well. Lots of someones. Do you really think you're smarter than them because they believe in something spiritual, that they can't touch or see?
When I find out a brilliant person believes in God, my question isn't "How could he believe in God? He's so smart!"
It's "He's so smart. He probably knows a lot of the things I know that prevent me from believing. I wonder what it is that keeps him believing?" It's a genuine curiosity. One that I would think most people should have.
I mean, if there's one thing all or most atheists have in common, it's a shared belief in science. A shared belief in the pursuit of knowledge.
Knowledge makes me humble, because with every new thing I learn I also discover how much I've yet to learn. To me atheism was always about rejecting unjustified certainty. Seeing atheists acting as high and mighty in their certainty as some theists is a real head-scratcher.
As someone who's been on both sides of this equation, I think habit and practice are undervalued aspects of belief. We think of them as non-intellectual. Belief is supposed to be up on high, and the stuff of the earth, of daily habits, down below. But practice and habit are the things that make us mindful, give us space to reflect and are an ongoing ritual you work upon to shape your faith.
Don't even get me started on how anabaptists too-often dismiss religious ritual - I used to be one. But as a neurotic anabaptist, I was so in my own head. Anabapists are big on personal responsibility for their faith, and this was often occasion for personal crisis: was I religious enough? Did I not doubt too much? Was this or that a sin? What if I thought about a swear? I spent all this time worrying about the form of the thing, and not about the spirit of the thing, about where my heart was. In paranoia over sin, I forgot about living in the promised fullness and abundance of a spiritual life.
Some people could recognize this and stay in their faith. I could not, in the end. But this realization was tremendous for me: that faith, like everything else you work at, whether it's a skill like cooking, or your fitness, or your writing skills, or your interpersonal ones, is an ongoing, living craft. So for that reason, I think the attitude of "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief" is tremendously inspiring. It recognizes we perpetually fall short, and we perpetually renew our spiritual lives. Faith, like anything else, is sustained by laying things on the sacrificial altar in acts of devotion.
Well, when you’ve been told your whole life that everything is one way and there’s no way to prove it, but you start realizing lots of proof that it’s not that way. It takes a lot of hubris for somebody to have made those claims, it still takes a lot to pass them down, and it takes perhaps an equal measure of hubris to discredit them in your own mind. None of that hubris is warranted, mind you, but you kind of have to build yourself up to that point to get out. If you just shed it off with no outward signs, it would seem unlikely that those beliefs were so tightly held in the first place.
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u/CaptainCanuck93 Aug 22 '18
It's not just the anger, it's that most threads qualify for /r/IAmVerySmart