Have you ever had a calling from God?

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My neighbour is an accountant. He is 33, married to a lovely woman and has no children. They are both very Christian and regularly talk about God in everyday conversation ie. when they got married they could feel God’s presence etc.

He has recently had a calling from God to try a long held dream to become a singer. He says he has felt God leading him down this path and can no longer refuse him.

This is all great but what does a calling from God actually involve? What’s the difference between that and just deciding you fancy a career change? As a non Christian this is not something I have ever experienced but interested to find out.

So many churches/ Christians work in refugee camps. That’s their faith driving them to volunteer and provide food and shelter, often with their own funds, to support war torn nations.

The vast majority of Christians do nothing of the kind. And huge numbers of people who work in refugee camps/overseas aid are not remotely concerned with religious belief. Because of some work I used to do I know a lot of people who work for/formerly worked for two big Christian aid organisations who work in developing countries. Not one of those people, who did admirable, unglamorous, important work, had any religious belief.

Its not as extreme as God simply returning and stopping wars - but as it’s already been explained, that’s not how faith works

With respect, that's the kind of ineffectual verbal handwaving that is resorted to every time someone asks a person who believes in an omnipotent god why he's doing such a shit job. And war is an easy example, because the religious get to sigh and look wise and say 'Oh, free will' -- what about epidemics, tsunamis, earthquakes? Because to someone not blinded by religious belief, it looks awfully like your idea of god likes beating up and mistreating his creation while expecting it to praise him all the time with undiminished faith. And if that relationship involved two human people, it would look pretty fucking unhealthy.

I do feel I should add though - many people of other faiths run refugee camps too - it’s not unique to Christianity, or faith for that matter - but in my experience faith plays an enormous part for many volunteers.

My favourite, very lovely uncle has just died a very unpleasant death after having a pretty difficult few years.
I don't want anyone telling me God is good.
If God does exist then he is as bad as the Devil for allowing so much suffering.
I mean if people have to die why can't they just go out like a light surrounded by their loved ones, my Uncle went quite quickly but it was Sepsis so he wasn't in his right mind plus a blocked bowel. Awful. And my Auntie never made it to the hospital in time this morning.

Volcanoes, earthquakes, etc are acts of nature. Why would God stop them?

I think there is a real problem with people who see God literally as the Old Testament stuff rather than a way to understand our relationship with the external world and how that is affected by our internal world. That’s all it is.

Those who are very critical of God do seem to only understand him/her/it in a traditional hell fire damnation way. You develop your relationship with God and figure out the bits that make sense to you and accept them. Disregard the rest. Engage your critical factors faculties fully. Look at the stars (look how they shine for me!) Relax your mind and take in the absolute beauty of the world. It’s yours to enjoy. Then, I think you get a sense of the totality, the hugeness of the universe. It is not that there is a bearded Santa like character over the rainbow watching us - just that true oneness with life comes from seeing yourself as such a small part of a bigger thing but yit ur role is significant despite its ordinariness. Look at ants.

I have so definitely fallen in to the trippy side.

My church is involved in a programme with refugees. We’re all Christians. We regularly fundraise. The church provide aid regularly. They drive it across Europe themselves. We’re linked with many others that do the same.

The refugee support in my local city is Christian run and funded. It’s based in a large church and run by the church. There are non Christian volunteers too, including those of other faiths and none.

Many of my friends have volunteered in such schemes too.

You may have visited and worked in such places, and you may have found people without faith working for Christian orgs. They don’t discriminate, of course they accept non Christian volunteers, but it is funded and run by Christians with a Christian ethos.

Poverty in the U.K. is supported massively by Christian orgs too. Christians Against Poverty For example, do not discriminate in who works for them, however faith plays an enormous part in funding, volunteering and running it.

Yes volunteering in such places is unglamorous- in fact it’s often horrifically traumatic, regardless of your faith - not sure of your point there.

I’m not sure why you’re swearing at me. Have a look at posts already on here, they explain beautifully, the version of faith I identify with. I wish you well.

If you engage your critical faculties,surely you must see the holes in the argument for there being a God.Belief in an omnipotent bring can only work if you have faith(ie just believe in the stuff that doesn’t add up).

And again I agree with @Beebie.

The one organisation that has consistently fundraiser for Yemen is the church. The thing is that it is done discreetly, no fuss, no publicity. I also suspect that there has developed a horrible distinction between religious and non religious organisations with the no religious being seen as the proper, official, correct ones yet they may also be filled with religious people who keep that part of themselves private.

I am so sick of the assault on Christian thought that I keep my faith very private whilst also questioning parts of it. How does anyone know if people are truly religious or not?

And just look at the amount of stuff Jewish and Muslim communities do.

Israeli doctors were secretly treating Syrian and Palestinian refugees smuggled over the border. No fuss, no media. Just medical care.

So much of our modern world is shaped by the initiatives of the religious. Education, healthcare , parishes, community. They all existed to serve the human self.

If God was a decent being children would not need Christians against Poverty etc, I mean surely Jesus died to stop all the evil in the world.

From Christians (very well celebrated Christians who are still - even after death some of them - viewed by the organisation and parish as good Christians and someone
to aspire to:

'Why would you want to adopt? You might get a prostitutes child.'

Neglecting and abusing their own child in order to do gods work. Including asking a 7 year old child if he'd rather go and live with a family in a different country who would love him or go to boarding school because they cannot do gods work with him there.

Missionary work and everything that goes with this.

Bishop to wife: some young boys have accused your (vicar) husband of sexual abuse. You need to move away from the area and make sure it doesn't happen again.

Disowning a child who divorced his wife, because of said divorce but supporting the son in law (above) who abuses kids (including family) because he's a vicar.

'AIDS is gods punishment for people living in sin and being gay'

Christian organisations (more than one) who won't take students or workers who aren't Christian.

Christian organisations who are supposed to support refugees and trafficked women but won't support the gay women.

I could go on.

Being good and loving and living a good life is nothing to do with god or Jesus. It's a choice. Absolving yourself of responsibility by attributing it to a higher power is ridiculous at best and dangerous at worst.

@Beebie2

Thank you for your kind, interesting and thoughtful posts on this thread.
I have enjoyed reading them and feel you have expressed yourself very eloquently. Its a shame others cannot be so respectful because it hinders what can be a very interesting discussion.

I agree with what you say.

God can't save children from poverty because he's too busy helping accountants identify their destiny as dancers.

I think there are two things here regarding critical faculties. You can look at the sky and see scientifically: nebulas, stars, gases, etc

You can understand these in the way we identify as science. That , to me, is correct. Name, identify, examine, understand.

But on an emotional level you can use the same material to appreciate, get lost in, wonder and absorb and it can fill your senses and self with awe.
That’s great and all but the two should never be mixed or you create confusion.
The separate thing is behaviour - how we treat each other, respond and care fotr our world. For some people the science is incomprehensible, the language or ideas inaccessible so the visual is used to convey a sense of its presence (size, complexity, work outside of our immediate environment).

I think it is that simple particularly when you think about how far we have come in the last 200 years of knowledge. Prior to that we really lived here in age of such immediate need and poverty.

So many churches/ Christians work in refugee camps. That’s their faith driving them to volunteer and provide food and shelter, often with their own funds, to support war torn nations.

My Dad was in the army.
They were once in a village that was on its knees.
The soldiers were ripping apart their packs to give to the villagers. He still remembers a mother sobbing to him because her babies mouth was covered in sores and all he had to offer was a tube of bonjela.
He said a massive truck of Christina's rocked up and all they brought was bibles.

He asked why they didn't bring supplies. They responded they brought the word of God.

He wanted to shove it up their asses.

Atheists do a lot of charity work. But they do it because it's good.
Not because it gets you brownie points with the man who created that hell.

God can't save children from poverty because he's too busy helping accountants identify their destiny as dancers

You develop your relationship with God and figure out the bits that make sense to you and accept them. Disregard the rest. Engage your critical factors faculties fully.

I don't think you understand what 'engaging your critical factors' (faculties?) means.

So much of our modern world is shaped by the initiatives of the religious. Education, healthcare , parishes, community. They all existed to serve the human self.

I think you should really think about what you've just said there. And I have certainly not 'sworn at' you, @Beebie2. 'Fucking was an intensifier as used in my point about how, if an actual human consistently visited upon another person horrors that were within his power to remove and expected love, worship and praise in return, that would be considered an unhealthy relationship.

@AlexisCarringtonColbyDexter

I extend the same thanks. I feel that Christians on this thread have represented the faith well despite the constant abuse.

@Fedhimtotigers
My Grandad was in the war too. He experienced his own father perish an awful death during the same war. He felt that his faith and prayer carried him through. He died loving God.

No a bible doesn’t solve everything, I imagine that circumstance was potentially insulting. I’m not talking about that type of ‘Christian’ support though.

@Navalwort I don’t think that describes my relationship with God.

I can’t remember who said it, but someone implied that asking questions is indicative of someone wanting a deeper relationship with god.

I think that’s quite presumptive. I ask questions out of interest, not out of any desire for a relationship with a deity I don’t believe exists. But then I’m not an angry atheist in that I’m not angry with god - that would be futile. Atheism is as much an active choice as Christianity.

@Navelwort

None of it makes sense. Nothing in the world makes sense. Babies dying in pain? Illness, disease? None of it makes sense to anyone who looks at the world critically. But what happens when you do? you can lose all hope of change, become overwhelmed, cynical. Religious people are, in my mind, the ones who have said shit is happening but despite that I am still going to do something that I can.Slowly over time, we have realised that there are things we can do to both minimise chances of negative outcomes and maximise the positive. Until 50 years ago cancer was always seen as a terminal illness now we look at it in very different ways.

By understanding the very small changes we can make we can change the direction of previously seen as inevitable trajectories.

That is not the preserve of the religious by all means but to those experiencing these things might need something almost otherworldly to make sense of it. How do you comfort a grieving mother? Really? I don’t believe in telling fairytales but I do believe that religious thinking allows a space to exist whereby we can then acknowledge the grief and crucially, give a language to the emotions of madness, anger, hate, jealousy , rage that once acknowledged can then allow the person to move on. It doesn’t make sense, I agree. That doesn’t stop it from working though.

I think about the stories of the Jewish women who retained their faith after their experiences. I had previously read Primo Levi’s If I was a man which talks of loss of faith.

If those women could something to hold on to despite their experiences, I think it I extraordinarily arrogant and presumptuous of us to dismiss it.

Also, I do think we have to take this into context. It is very different being here in a modern country with medicine, security, etc. For those in other places where there is less infrastructure faith is the language of progression, positivity, seeing what you have rather than what is lacking.

I think if you examine religion from a doctrinal perspective it fails but it isn’t lived by that, it’s lived by real people doing their best, often under difficult circumstances

I was once told by a priest that the reason I was committing sins against god was because I wanted to hurt him, which meant I believed in him. Which cracked me up as a lovely bit of mental gymnastics.

@Navelwort

I have had very mixed experiences with priests. One absolutely destroyed me in minutes. He was very much the social, do good for publicity type in my mind. I was shocked and humiliated after speaking to him and it really affected me. Absolutely, he failed in his duty and compassion as a humane a priest. I met a really fantastic priest who saw things in a very academic way and in one very quick moment gave me a perspective that I couldn’t articulate myself. This man emanated kindness and spoke from that position. That to me, is Christ ‘s world - the one of kindness, compassion and care. If one priest can be so different to the other than that tells me all i need to know about their wisdom. It wasn’t mined in the hardship of raising 11 children like my grandmother, or raising a handicapped child like the other side of the family. Christ’s message is hope, love and chill - it’ll all work out but it is based on a human understanding of the human heart and it’s fragility.

None of it makes sense to anyone who looks at the world critically. But what happens when you do? you can lose all hope of change, become overwhelmed, cynical. Religious people are, in my mind, the ones who have said shit is happening but despite that I am still going to do something that I can.

This is just absolutely not true.

So many incorrect assumptions.

We keep reading how those who have a Christian belief on this thread are behaving in so much of a better way than others but that's not true. Huge judgements are being made about Christian v non Christian behaviour but because people aren't saying fuck they think it's somehow OK.

@Beebie2 my Dad wasn't at war at that time.

Also. Considering what the Jews went through. Considering what was written on the walls of Auschwitz about God having to ask for his forgiveness your Dads account doesn't mean a lot to me.

Why didn't your God save those in the camps? Were they not pious enough? Did they not pray hard enough? Was it because they didn't follow the 'right' religion?

When someone religious can justify why their God allowed what happened to those people I may start believing.

@Girlinterruption2020

I’m with Beebie2 on this. Jesus is all about the love - his message is essentially ‘chill’ don’t stress the detail and focus on the broader strokes.

So where were god and Jesus when I was raped then? It's so dismissive to say not to focus on broader strokes when many of us have had trauma in our lives that mean there cannot be a loving god or if there is, he hasn't chosen to love us.

My atheism is every bit as valid a belief as your Christianity. I don't lack something from not believing, I believe something strongly - that there is no god.

When Christians say to pray when someone's child is sick and claim it as a victory / miracle of prayer when they recover they are essentially saying god didn't save other sick children because their parents didn't pray / didn't pray enough / their child was less worthy of recovery.

When I have children I won't be getting them baptised / christened because I want them to be good because they want to be good, not because they are scared of eternal damnation.

I love wholeheartedly, I'm a good person, I've made my peace with the trauma I've been through in my life, I've worked hard to come out the other side. It is totally dismissive when religious people say that god has had anything to do with that. Unless you place some accountability in gods lap for the awful things people to through, you can't give him credit for people recovering from those awful things.

The kind of god who would let things like natural disasters happen in a world he apparently created isn't the kind of god I can understand worshipping. Ditto the kids with cancer argument.

Faith is just that - agreeing something doesn't make sense and cannot be proved but believing it anyway. But you have to accept that some of those beliefs are dismissive and reductive when applied to loads of people's situations.

People in Africa starving to death and CAFOD go to 'help' them. Why doesn't god 'help' them by doing something with this infinite power he has?

@ineedsun

Did you read the rest of the paragraph?

We are a Christian country in terms of our infrastructure. The Queen, House of Lords, daily act of worship. The background to our daily lives are shaped rightly or wrongly by the institutions in this country that are Christian in nature. As any Jewish or Muslim person or atheist will tell you.

What we do within that a structure may come from atheism or other belief/non beliefs but we are still shaped to a degree by it. If you lived in a non Christian country can you can see this quite sharply.

Those who do not subscribe to Christianity or any faith are just as prevalent in those sectors as the non religious I didn’t mean to imply they are not.

@BackseatCookers

I agree with all of your points. Random acts of violence affect good people every day and it makes no sense.

For some people, they couldn’t do what you do- they couldn’t overcome a trauma like that. Their response would be to take that anger out on someone else. My point is that actually you didn’t - you did a brave and courageous thing by acknowledging it and dealing with it yourself and drawing on whatever resources you had. Some people don’t have that - but the belief that things change, things get better, that the moral arc moves slowly is all they can hold onto.