Doubt and atheism....

I was trying to find what i wrote in what i'm making into a book and it's not there? I wrote it one already. I guess it wasn't good enough and i'll have to rewrite it again. The book is about completed with the exception of the apparition.

I copied that from my blog. I wrote it a long time ago when i was in the beginning of my journey to find the truth. I titled it angel because i didn't know anything about apparitions or Mary being the one that gives out these spiritual gifts.

I'm going through the same thing right now. My mother just recently lost her battle with lung cancer and then my father had a heart attack about a week ago and had to have open heart surgery in which he is still recovering. All this has pretty much plunged me into a dark night of the soul where I'm wondering if God has abandoned me or even exists so you aren't alone in your time of doubt right now.

Kaonashi said:

I'm going through the same thing right now. My mother just recently lost her battle with lung cancer and then my father had a heart attack about a week ago and had to have open heart surgery in which he is still recovering. All this has pretty much plunged me into a dark night of the soul where I'm wondering if God has abandoned me or even exists so you aren't alone in your time of doubt right now.

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praying for you and your dad

Hello first of all I do not mean to be harsh but those people do not look okay, something seems very wrong here.

People have been dying since the beginning of time, to think that we just rose up from the swamps is not a good way to think. We are made in the image of God, Genesis 1:27 tells us this and here is how you can know there is a God.

I do not even feel like I want to explain this, but I sense something very evil.

Mark 2:17 "On hearing this, Jesus said to them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

You need Jesus and you need to give up these evil things.

Proverbs 15:17 "Better a meal of vegetables where there is love than a fattened calf with hatred."

1 John 5:4 "for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith."

You need to overcome through Christ and become a new creation.

2 Corinthians 5:17 "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!"

Do not chase after the wind, do not mess around with evil things

Matthew 16:26 "What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?"

I am pleading with you,

Luke 19:10 "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost."

Ask God to forgive you and ask for the Holy Spirit also please read Romans Chapter 1, this will shed alot of light on believing and having faith.

Deathbyfruit said:

Hello first of all I do not mean to be harsh but those people do not look okay, something seems very wrong here.

People have been dying since the beginning of time, to think that we just rose up from the swamps is not a good way to think. We are made in the image of God, Genesis 1:27 tells us this and here is how you can know there is a God.

I do not even feel like I want to explain this, but I sense something very evil.

Mark 2:17 "On hearing this, Jesus said to them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

You need Jesus and you need to give up these evil things.

Proverbs 15:17 "Better a meal of vegetables where there is love than a fattened calf with hatred."

1 John 5:4 "for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith."

You need to overcome through Christ and become a new creation.

2 Corinthians 5:17 "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!"

Do not chase after the wind, do not mess around with evil things

Matthew 16:26 "What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?"

I am pleading with you,

Luke 19:10 "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost."

Ask God to forgive you and ask for the Holy Spirit also please read Romans Chapter 1, this will shed alot of light on believing and having faith.

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I'm not entirely convinced this is as helpful as you might think. For a start, we all have Bibles and know how to use them; this is a woman who is needing compassion from her fellow humans to renew her faith. A list of quotes is not necessarily the best way of demonstrating that, particularly when they come labels such as "evil".

Have you never experienced this doubt? Perhaps a relation of what was helpful for you would be more appropriate.

stone said:

I was trying to find what i wrote in what i'm making into a book and it's not there? I wrote it one already. I guess it wasn't good enough and i'll have to rewrite it again. The book is about completed with the exception of the apparition.

I copied that from my blog. I wrote it a long time ago when i was in the beginning of my journey to find the truth. I titled it angel because i didn't know anything about apparitions or Mary being the one that gives out these spiritual gifts.

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hope you'll let us know when your book is done. that's quite the journey. sound like the stuff of movies.

sorry to hear about your loss Kaonashi. prayers that your father makes it through. i lost my dad to cancer when i was 19, i can't imagine what it would've been to have to worry about losing my mom around the same time. may God comfort you in this trying time.

when i see other grieve with so much sorrow, it makes me question my love for my departed father and relatives. because, so far, no one that died around me caused me to cry much. i know that life doesn't end there and trust that Jesus is looking after them.

when i heard that my grandmother was dying earlier this year, my main worry was for her to have her last sacrament. i hoped on the train and prayed through most of the night's 14 hour ride. when i got to her bedside, although i had not seen my cousins in 6 years, i went straight to praying for her and found out that she had not seen a priest yet although they knew she could die any moment, they waited for me to get there before they called for the priest. this was unsettling to me.

the priest arrived just as i finished saying the rosary. and after the last sacraments were administered to her, i felt more at peace. one of my cousin who showed up around that time bursted into tears. after all she had partly been raised by our grandmother but her tears, she admitted were born from her own fear of death. my cousins and relatives on my father's side all pretty much have abandoned the faith and i'm much more worried about them dying in that state. to me that's a worst tragedy.

there did happen something that's too much for coincidence while i was by my grandmother's bedside. my mom also came with me and when i placed my green scapular on my grandmother, one of my cousin inquired about what it was. while explaining, i noticed i had a small image of a nun tucked in with it. when i said who it was, my mom informed us that my grand mother had gone to her convent many many years ago and had obtained a healing from visiting that nun's remains. that little image was given to me by a priest back home. i had no idea who she was. he encouraged me to do some research about her. so i believe that little nun was there by my grandmother's bedside interceding for her at her last hour.

Kaonashi said:

I'm going through the same thing right now. My mother just recently lost her battle with lung cancer and then my father had a heart attack about a week ago and had to have open heart surgery in which he is still recovering. All this has pretty much plunged me into a dark night of the soul where I'm wondering if God has abandoned me or even exists so you aren't alone in your time of doubt right now.

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I feel for you, i have had loss in my life. Losing a parent is difficult.

God didnt abandon you, but it was her time to go home to the Lord. The next time you see her you will have eternal bliss together on the golden roads of Heaven where tears are no longer possible.

It seems like abandonment for sure, but we are all born to die the mortal body and have true life in God in His Kingdom..

Sounds like this has greatly affected your dad - and he had a heart attack.
It may be either the strain of loss or coincidence... but your mom would not trade places to be on earth again when Heaven is beyond our comprehension in exceeding joy and peace.

Time will heal you, and deep prayer. You can even speak to your mom now in prayer [means to converse] and ask the Lord to help you get through this.
He wants you to look up and if we could only know the awe of Heaven we would not have sorrow for our loved ones, perhaps a bit of envy and definitely missing them in our day to day - but also in some way a sense of sheer happiness for them.

I really am sorry for the pain you are in... i know it for sure.
I will pray for your folks today at Mass and for you.

The Philosoraptor said:

This is going to be a long-ish post, but please bear with me. I've spent a long time wrestling with just this problem and I know how you feel.

Before I begin, I'm going to recommend two books;
"The Concept of Anxiety"
&
"Either/Or"
both by Soren Kierkegaard; he writes about the "leap of faith" which is all about why religion is meaningful precisely because we are insecure about the choices we make, and either/or is written about finding the meaning of religion in an otherwise meaningless universe.

I'm going to boil it down along the same lines;

If we are all wrong, and there is no such thing as God, so what?
One of the beautiful things about Catholicism is that it doesn't really need God in the same way other branches of Christianity do - it can make sense even without the teachings coming directly from the creator of the universe.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that even if God does not exist, then Catholicsm is still worthwhile; the church has social and moral teachings which can stand alone and are enhanced by divinity, not justified by it.

(Think, for example, "it is morally wrong to eat certain kinds of food because my God says so" compared to "it is morally wrong to take a life because my God says so". Which one of those statements can still make sense without the "because God says so" bit?)

It seems to me like your main concern is that if there is no God there is no hope for things to be better. I don't think that is true; as long as there are people in the world who want to make it better, and who are willing to work to make it better (people like the Catholic Church) there is always hope for the future. Even if there is no God who exists as a being, why can we not have Him as a concept which drives us on to better ends?

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sorry mate, if there is no God then faith is futile. Jesus lived and showed His apostles that God exists and that He is a personal God whom was willing to pay the ultimate price to reverse the damage we created.

To go to church for any other reason but God is like going to a restaurant to simply read the menu and go home.

Christ's_Warrior said:

sorry mate, if there is no God then faith is futile. Jesus lived and showed His apostles that God exists and that He is a personal God whom was willing to pay the ultimate price to reverse the damage we created.

To go to church for any other reason but God is like going to a restaurant to simply read the menu and go home.

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It is a justification for having faith even if ultimately that faith is in something that doesn't exist. Philosophically, one cannot assume God exists. To do so would make it theology, or at least a very limited form of philosophy. The argument is used to justify the existence of religion philosophically.

I don't think he's saying that we should go to church and not have faith. He's saying that we should go to church and have faith, but he gives a non-religious reason to have faith.

Thanks Darklite; got it in one.

Christ's_Warrior said:

sorry mate, if there is no God then faith is futile. Jesus lived and showed His apostles that God exists and that He is a personal God whom was willing to pay the ultimate price to reverse the damage we created.

To go to church for any other reason but God is like going to a restaurant to simply read the menu and go home.

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Look - read the Kierkegaard books. Faith has many many dimensions to it, and I've never come across an author who brings that out better. In fact, from what I understand in "philosophical crimbs" the argument is that even if there was no God before we had Faith in Him, there is afterwards. (The argument that God is extant as a conceptual being regardless of human intervention and that human faith merely brings about the instantiation of this conceptual entity in a limited form).

Faith without God is not futile, and is in itself enough to save the world. Even hardcore atheists like Sartre will testify that Faith has the power to save an individual in and of itself. ("L'existentialism est un humanism", 1946) Religious philosophers simply take this one step further and suggest that the saving power of faith is directly related to God in some way.

If you continue to act as if you do believe - Matthew 25 - it will all fall into place, in due course. Your faith will return, strengthened. It's the commitment to selfless love that counts. As James pointed out, "The devils believe and tremble."

Brikkz said:

Thanks Paul.

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Hey kiddo, read here:

Proof That God Exists: favourite quotes

Brikkz said:

I saw this website back when I was considering Christianity. Thanks Joab.

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Hmmm, well you considered it and went though with it.

Something must have opened your mind back then. What was it?

The Philosoraptor said:

Kierkegaard

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The self is the self that relates the self unto the self for the self with the self but only if the self is the self that is in itself of the self from the self to the self but within the self by the self into the self through the self. Despaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrr!!!!!111

^ That's all I can think of whenever I think of Kierkegaard.