I never have at any time. I can remember asking questions when I was about seven years old like "Tell me the truth. Is there really a God?" and then thinking that God was sort of like Santa Claus for grownups. Because the whole thing sounds completely ridiculous to me, as does spirits, afterlife, and all their accessories.

Sometimes, I can sort of fall into it. I served a mission, for example. I call that period of my life the time when I was a "believing Mormon," but I actually wasn't. I was just afraid enough of my own unbelief to do extraordinarily contradictory things.

I have friends who have all sorts of beliefs across the spectrum, and I find some of them very fascinating. It can be like a big, sweeping story with a lot of characters and themes. I'm sorry, but it's really all just a mythology to me, interesting though it may be. I think it's cool sometimes. Almost every belief system has something about it that is appealing.

For a long time, I thought if I tried hard enough, read enough, prayed enough, obeyed enough, paid enough, attended mindless meetings enough that maybe I would receive the magic touch of the divine and then it would all become clear to me. Obviously that has never happened.

I hear atheists say that they leave the door open for the possibility of deities, because you can't *know* that there's none. You can only lack belief. To me, that's sort of like saying that you lack belief in the existence of Santa Claus, because we haven't searched every square inch of the North Pole for evidence of Santa's Workshop -- and it's possible that it might be invisible or in a different dimension. Actually, there are a lot of "strong" atheists. Penn Jillette is one.

I have felt like a stranger in a strange land all my life. I really think that there is a faith gene, and I haven't got it. I could go on and on with the experiences that I've had feeling like an outsider around religious people, praying around the table, fervently believing in scriptures, spiritual experiences, NDEs, whatever. Sorry, but I'm just not feeling it, and I never did.

Please tell me I'm not the only one.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2013 11:04AM by Makurosu.

Faith is just where your mind goes for a vacation.

I feel the same as you. I never really had faith, I had brainwashing which I thought was faith. I think while people are out looking for proof of Santa Claus they should also look for proof of faith because they are going to find both in the same place.

When I see attempts to define faith, people often say, well I have faith the sun will come up tomorrow. That is not faith, that is probability based on intelligent observation. Mostly when people talk about faith it falls into two categories: Wishful thinking based on nothing, or probability based on gathered data.

Then there are those that say hope is the belief in things unseen. Bull. That is hope or that is belief and the two mixed together make mush. And things unseen? Unicorns, fairies, goblins, and god.

Yes, the fallacy of saying that it's like knowing the sun will come up in the morning only works if you'd never seen or felt the sun, and there were 10,000 different interpretations of what the sun is actually like, and there is absolutely no evidence at all for such a thing to the point where you wonder whose idea it was originally. That's God to me.

You are not the only one.

I've never believed in God. I saw the circular logic required to believe in it even as a wee girl before I knew what circular logic even was.

Fortunately I grew up in a non-religious home but I remember a school chum saying to me that the Bible was the word of God. I asked, 'Did you see God write it? How do you know for sure?' And it was at that moment I decided God was just as true as, like you say Mak, Santa.

The parallels between believing in Santa and God were obvious to me. Though I did believe in Santa for a while (at least there was some evidence --> presents!!!!), I never bought the God stuff.

It must have been weird growing up surrounded by people who do believe.

No you are not the only one. But I will say this. You come from culture that does not encourage study,and so the absence of "feeling" leads you to conclude that you have no faith at all. I think faith is a process which requires study and discipline. It's like the 12 step program. One day at a time. Not something that is "proofed" out of the sky one day and never leaves. Mother Theresa talks of spending some thirty years experiencing the "dark night of the soul". Yet she had unshakeable faith. I spend about 60 percent of my life wondering if any of it is true, then every now and then I am that it is.

Agate Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> No you are not the only one. But I will say this.
> You come from culture that does not encourage
> study,and so the absence of "feeling" leads you to
> conclude that you have no faith at all.

That's true of Mormonism today, but it wasn't always that way. When I was growing up, study was very much encouraged. I had 100+ hardcover LDS books at the time I left the Church, and I had read and studied them all. I had prayed for decades and never. felt. anything. If there is anything to the supernatural at all then 0% of it exists in the Mormon faith, and I've found no indication whatsoever that it exists anywhere else. I suppose I could keep trying though for another 40 years.

Yea, for some people, faith would be hard to give in to, so to speak. After all, you can't prove what you have faith in, well in alot of cases anyway. So being able to trod through life having faith is always hard, even if you have the ability to have it. I understand Mother Teresa "doubted". I have. You're really no different than most people.

So, I'm no different from most people, because they also think that religion is as outrageously silly as believing in Santa Claus? I don't think you read my post.

Well, maybe I need to re-read it. But you're wrong, just like alot of people here. I did read it.

I tried for a long, long time but there just wasn't any evidence and I gave up. I must say, it's nice not to have the stress of constantly arguing with my rational mind.

You are not the only one. It's nice to be able to embrace reality with more clarity, not befuddled or befogged by the mind-bending trappings and rules of a con man's ad hoc metaphysical scam.

You asked lol

I believe that people have different "gifts" And I also believe that there is a spirit/body connection. For instance, if you are depressed, your spirit may have trouble activating physical manifestations that start a cycle of spirit, body, spirit, body. We have endorphins, neurotrasmitters, hormones that can amplify feelings. Some days I can feel love for a person, and the next day, I don't feel it.

My brothers family seems to see angels...I don't. Maybe you have intuition, empathy, caring, insight, you are grounded, whatever...

I believe that sometimes if you want a prayer answered, you have to be praying about the right thing, a subject you should be praying about. It may take trial and error to figure out what that is.

Sometimes if we feel we get a divine message, we have to believe it and not discount it, and sometimes that is hard to do.

I personally have a lot of faith, in fact, life would have no meaning to me without it. This is probably because ALL the mormons in my life have made my life difficult. All the mormons in my life have been an irritation. I no longer have admiration for cultic people that lack empathy, are judgemental, controlling, conditional, heartless. I suppose all I have left to rely on is my faith in God and Jesus. My whole mormon world has vanished and those mormons that are still in it, irritate the hell out of me.

My faith has allowed me to see through mormonism and discover Christianity, and I believe that they are two different things.

I admit I like certain belief systems more than others. I like to hear people talking about their experiences with the supernatural or dreams of close family members who have passed on, because I think that's fascinating. I don't really know why. Maybe it's because that kind of thing is unpopular to talk about too, and my real irritation is not being able to express my unbelief.

I live in the deep south, and I don't even know any Mormons around here. I think Jesus said some great things, but I can't identify with the Christians around me at all. However, I do find them to be friendlier and they have more empathy than the reptiles in Utah. On the other hand, I'm always the one who has to understand things from their point of view and not the other way around. If I was to reveal that I'm an atheist at say a dinner party, there would be an uncomfortable silence and then I wouldn't get invited to any more dinner parties. How come I'm the pariah? I'm just believing what comes naturally to me -- which is nothing. They're allowed to say whatever wild-ass thing they want, while I have to live in the closet. It's annoying.

I want to be able to respect what other people think, but it would be nice to get the same in return and frankly some people believe some pretty outrageous things.

You are definitely not the only one.

Faith, as defined in Sunday School growing up, always made my head spin. It made no sense to me at all. I have recently heard two definitions of faith which I like much better and DO make perfect sense to me.

The first one I heard from Sam Harris. He says that faith is the permission religious people give one another to continue believing when reason fails.

The second one says that faith is the gap between where the facts end, and what you hope to be true. When what you hope to be true contradicts the facts (Mormonism)...that's not faith. That's delusion.

I like that second definition. It's also called the "god of the gaps." Science reigns supreme, but there is room for faith in the spaces in between.

You are not the only one.

As a child in (non-Mo) Sunday School we were introduced to reasons why the Bible is true. The first reason presented was that the Bible says it is true.

Nonsense.

Faith is nothing more than the excuse people use to believe in things for which there is no evidence. I don't see any reason to apologize for not being taken in by faith.

I used to have faith. I believed 100% all the lies the Morg puts out. Through faith, I "knew" that a con-man was a prophet, three non-existent civilizations used to live in the Americas, and a blatant fraud was scripture. So, clearly, faith isn't evidence of truth! Through the same faith, I also "knew" that there was an all-powerful sky-daddy who loved and murdered his children, I "knew" he wrote a book through an obscure tribe of iron-aged goat-herders, and I "knew" that I would live forever and eventually go to some happy cloud-world with my loving/abusive sky-daddy. Faith is faith. Bull crap is bull crap.

You're not the only one. I was raised catholic, went to catholic school, had very observant catholic parents, etc.

I never believed a word of it. I remember vividly sitting in church when I was seven years old in training for first communion, which is a Very Big Deal for catholic kids. I was looking around at the nuns and my schoolmates wondering how on earth anybody believed this crap. I mean really, the little Styrofoam wafer turns into the actual body of a long-dead guy. Right.

I went along with it as long as I lived with my parents, but didn't really hide my unbelief. So long as I sat through mass every damn week, they didn't much care.

I tried other, increasingly more liberal religions, including the United Methodists, Friends, and UUs. Nothing. There is zero evidence of a god no matter how much some people are scared of dying.

That's how it was. I had ex-Catholic friends growing up who had the same experience at that age.

NEVER APOLOGIZE for how you feel. It is your right to feel as you may.

I think personalities come into play too. I know we have asked about the meyer-briggs test before and a good portion of us exmos are similar types. I am a INTP and was reading about it not long ago and i saw where INTPs are the most likely of all personality types to be non religious.

Is that right? I'm an INTP too. I guess that would explain my complete lack of religious inclination. Really, it's like sitting at a concert and being completely deaf. I enjoy the social experience, but I can't hear the music at all.

When I was about 4 I shared a room with two other siblings. Every night we would have what we called fairy meetings. We would go under out blankets and pretend like we were talking to a group of fairies.

When we were done talking to them we would pop out from under our covers and tell each other what our fairies had to say, and what kinds of things they we doing and planning. We naturally tried to out do each other.

Having or feeling faith was exactly like that to me. Everyone would come to church and talk about what the spirit had planned and what the spirit said to them. In testimony meeting it became a competition of trying to outdo each other. All of that time we suspected that they no more had a spirit talking to them than we did. They were just hoping that they did. Pretending that they did so they would fit in with the group. It just doesn't work if someone stands up and says: OK, I know you're all faking it.

Fairy meetings! Is that ever cute. :-)

See also: The Emperor's New Clothes.