[NF] What would life be without your faith?

[Joehobo]

Life would have been a lot more lonely, and darker. Faith gave me blind hope when I needed it.

*untethers your balloon for you are a leaf on the wind and we can watch you soar*

Why did the leaf cross the road?

 

[Anew Leaf]

Life would have been a lot more lonely, and darker. Faith gave me blind hope when I needed it.



Why did the leaf cross the road?

Because when the wind whispers a song in your ear, who can resist its siren allure? No one. Not even a leaf.

 

[Joehobo]

I like that. The leaf just couldn't resist.

I feel ashamed that my answer was just going to be "because the wind was blowing it".

 

[gromit]

If I didn't believe or hope in anything GOOD in the universe, that would be kinda depressing. I imagine I would be quite bummed out.

 

[cascadeco]

I suppose a fair amount of this could boil down to semantics. What some view as 'hope' or 'belief', I personally don't view or define as such... i.e. for me I see beauty and know/experience/see goodness, so it's not a matter of belief, I feel like it's just a real thing; it happens, it's there. Just like there's the ugly and cruelty,etc. So I don't feel like I need to 'have faith' that there's good in the world, because I know there is. ?? (and I simultaneously don't need a higher power to exist in ways it's usually believed in, for me to see good and know beauty ). I suppose though there's always the universal subjectivity amongst all of is, in what we each personally view as 'good'/'bad', beautiful/ugly, etc etc. Although there's also universals to all of these too, I imagine, but I don't want to get into a philosophical discussion on any of it, as all of these things can have separate convuluted discussions on their own.

 

[gromit]

I suppose a fair amount of this could boil down to semantics. What some view as 'hope' or 'belief', I personally don't view or define as such... i.e. for me I see beauty and know/experience/see goodness, so it's not a matter of belief, I feel like it's just a real thing; it happens, it's there. Just like there's the ugly and cruelty,etc. So I don't feel like I need to 'have faith' that there's good in the world, because I know there is. ?? (and I simultaneously don't need a higher power to exist in ways it's usually believed in, for me to see good and know beauty ). I suppose though there's always the universal subjectivity amongst all of is, in what we each personally view as 'good'/'bad', beautiful/ugly, etc etc. Although there's also universals to all of these too, I imagine, but I don't want to get into a philosophical discussion on any of it, as all of these things can have separate convuluted discussions on their own.

Yeah it's kind of hard to conceive of a world where those things do not exist...

 

[1487610420]

I suppose a fair amount of this could boil down to semantics. What some view as 'hope' or 'belief', I personally don't view or define as such... i.e. for me I see beauty and know/experience/see goodness, so it's not a matter of belief, I feel like it's just a real thing; it happens, it's there. Just like there's the ugly and cruelty,etc. So I don't feel like I need to 'have faith' that there's good in the world, because I know there is. ?? (and I simultaneously don't need a higher power to exist in ways it's usually believed in, for me to see good and know beauty ). I suppose though there's always the universal subjectivity amongst all of is, in what we each personally view as 'good'/'bad', beautiful/ugly, etc etc. Although there's also universals to all of these too, I imagine, but I don't want to get into a philosophical discussion on any of it, as all of these things can have separate convuluted discussions on their own.

Different people will have different insight, self awareness, and coping mechanisms, and consequently attachment to external dogmas in search for psychological resilience.

 

[Beorn]

It would be epic???

Silly questions deserve silly answers.

 

[Joehobo]

It's beginning to reek of condescension.

 

[Cellmold]

I dont know much about faith in the sense of a spiritual or religious sense. But from an early age it was made clear to me by many that any irrationality would be stamped out, squashed and thrown away.

Not necessarily my parents, but most of the other people I grew up around appeared to exist to make sure I didn't have faith in anything, that my hope was nothing more than a mild squeaking of the mind.

In retaliation I used to retreat into fantasy, I adored the imagination and the inside of my own head...to the rejection of the 'physical' world. But even so my entire experience of faith is to have it taken from you as soon as possible....and then be projected to being told how you are wrong in every sense.

Wrong ideals, wrong work ethic, wrong morals, wrong thoughts, wrong preferences, wrong dress sense, wrong argument style, wrong wrong wrong.....that's all I ever heard as a child and...even now quite often as an adult.

Trouble is, after a while you start to believe what others say if it is repeated enough....afterall, "why would they be repeating it?" Your mind asks you.
So any faith or hope I do have I automatically pick it apart like a corpse on the gibbet, exposed to crows, and then I destroy it and break it down because that is what I was indoctrinated to do.

So that is what life is like without hope or faith.

 

[Aquarelle]

I got this fortune in a fortune cookie the other day:

It's true, so I kept in, and keep in in my wallet now, to remind me. I don't consider myself a religious person, but I believe in a force of goodness. Generally this manifests itself, for me, as the fundamental goodness of mankind-- as the Quakers would say, "that of the divine in each of us"-- but sometimes I find myself becoming cynical and allowing myself to focus too much on the bad. Then I start to feel depressed, hopeless and discouraged. If I did not have faith in the fundamental goodness of humans, that we are all worthy of love and kindness, and forgiveness, I don't think I'd enjoy life much at all. It's all too easy to let the few really bad people (because there are some) trick us into believing that anyone who does a bad thing-- even many bad things-- is a bad person. If that were the case, we'd all be bad people. And that is something I refuse to believe.

 

[RDF]

What would life be without your faith?

Faith in what? God? Santa Claus? That the sun will come up tomorrow?

I don't have a faith. its all just a shot in the dark for me.

When I was a child, I asked my mother where I came from. My mother answered, “A shot in the dark.”

 

[Istbkleta]

the faith God has in me and in us all.

God has faith in me/you/us?

 

[Lark]

God has faith in me/you/us?

If God did not all would cease to be.

 

[gretch]

I would classify myself as an agnostic theist, and by the way I have love every little bit of this thread -it has bee really lovely.
My greatest conflict with faith is with approach.

I was raised as go to church, pay your tithes, say your prayers, keep the sabbath, proselyte, then service till you bleed . Done. Yay Heaven! It is not necessarily ho the religion is itself per se, but it is in many ways how my parents would like to solve my crisis of faith.
I have no bad feeling or hard memories of my childhood religion. I love it with all my heart. Infact, I wish I had no hang ups as my close sister and my loving parents are both incredibly active and it means all the world to them -especially as I have children now too. I would love to have my children grow in that church actually, I believe it did nothing but good for me. Haha I feel my mother shaking me as I say that saying "then what's the problem, you're mostly there, right?"

It's just that I don't fit. I think that sounds sort of weird, but the subject matter to them as S's ( I was the only N in sight in both directions in my family) is very concrete, and for me, my spirituality is--not. I would like to talk about...maybe the implications of the concepts of the morality of justices and how it applicable today as opposed to the past. How we feel for those around us and truly see them and the walls we make. Maybe apply that to the biblical themes. -not that they wouldn't necessarily, but I get pretty blank looks. It for them is a pretty redundant dish of serve serve serve, do do do, right right right. I love it, but I'm not it. I have angst too. It's been hard for me to pray for a long time.

My father told me today after he surprised me and my two little girls to go to lunch that all he wanted for Christmas was for me to go back to church. It means so much to him, but him saying that is case in point of how differently I approach it. If I could just force it, or have it happen that easily I would have done it long ago. I would make my life so much easier. When I heard about the Hong Kong heiress Gigi's reaction to her father trying to get some man to woo her from being a lesbian with 65 million dollars I thought it was pretty much the exact relationship I have with mine (he is an ESTP) "At first I was entertained by it, and then that entertainment turned into the realization and conviction that I am a really lucky girl to have such a loving daddy," Gigi said. "It's really sweet of him to do something like this as an expression of his fatherly love."

I don't know, my faith is so entwined with my family. I was having a hard day with it when I saw this so sorry for the length.

I also find it uncomfortable to think of myself as believing one single set of beliefs, because it feels polarizing to me. If I believe that, then I believe everything else is wrong. I could never be that certain.