Where does belief in God come from?

[TooBusyByHalf]

I want to believe in God but I just don't. Can't make it make sense. Am vaguely thinking of returning to the church anyway, without faith, cos I like the singing and smells and all that but I think that would be dishonest.
Atheists, I know, ok? No need to explain why not to believe. Thank you.
Believers, why? Where does your faith come from?

Oh, Capsium, yes you did! You said atheists can have the same values as Christians- suggesting a) that Christian values are somehow superior and b) that most atheists don't have them!

You have added your own meaning to what I said there Hak, I meant no more and no less than what I said.

'Can' just simply means can, they might share the same values or might not. No value judgement is implicit.

It seems as if some of you might just want me to act all superior and metaphorically swoop down like some avenging angel, just so you would have someone to fight with sometimes...

No what I meant caps is a specific example of a decision you have made that you wouldn't have had you not had a christian faith?

But why would there be any such example? Surely if your conscience dictates your choices or decisions in life, it doesn't have a complete make-over if you stop or start having faith. Why would it?

Caps said her conscience was informed by her christian faith so I asked her to give me an example of how she knows any decision is as a result of her christian faith and not just her own independent decision making based on her developed sense of right or wrong outside of religion.

head I think the process of being changed by faith is gradual, partly subconscious and personal. Using my own experience of how my conscience is informed by faith does not mean I could attempt to extrapolate how someone else will be changed since I believe we all have different starting point, strengths and weaknesses. Essentially we develop individually.

Personally, I can say, before I actively explored my Christian Faith I used have little qualms about lying to people. I was quite Machiavellian in this respect. Now I find lying very difficult, even the prospect of being evasive, makes me feel very uncomfortable. But that is about my personal development of my personal faith. People with other faiths and none might feel the same or differently.

I can give 2 personal examples from my life of decisions/actions that were informed by my Christian values that a non Christian would be fairly likely to deal with differently.
The first situation involves a family member who sexually abused myself,my cousin,one of my best friends and numerous other girls he came into contact with through his teaching job. He went to prison for his known offences and is now out again.My cousins dad is his twin brother and the only family he has left. They are Christians and although horrified by his actions , still support him and have him for meals/Christmas etc. I and my family have also forgiven him and we treat him kindly when we see him,although I have also told him as an adult, what an effect his actions had on my 6 year old self. I actually feel genuine compassion for him as he is a sad,friendless,lonely old man.
The second situation involves my mother-in-law. She is very anti-Christian and when my husband became a Christian at uni, his parents threatened to disown him.They came round eventually and things were okay until he met me,a Christian, and we refused to live together,got engaged and married quite quickly(in our 30's) against their wishes. My MIL said vile things about me. I am very tall with a deep voice.She told him he would probably discover I was actually a man on honeymoon. She made him choose between us. We got married.She refused contact for 11 years.My husband phoned when each of our kids were born.She put the phone down on him each time.It was heartbreaking. However, we told our kids about them and that we hoped they would meet them one day. My eldest daughter prayed from almost as soon as she could speak, every night,that she would meet her 'other Grandma and Grandpa' for years and years,often with tears in both her and my eyes. Suddenly, out of the blue, we were invited to their home around Christmas a couple of years ago and have been regularly since. I think that many would have been too angry to reconcile in those circumstances. I think without the Biblical exhortation to 'honour your parents' and a lifetime being taught forgiveness,tolerance,love etc, we may have made different choices. I have friends with difficult in-laws and often hear their young kids being very disrespectful of their grandparents because they hear their mum being rude about them.
I think Christian values can sometimes encourage you to take a more challenging path. That is not to say that a non christian may not have done the same things for different reasons.

Caps can you give a specific example re: the lying?

What is this head, confession? Have you never told a lie? Care to share a few of yours on here? Like a lot of people I lied when I was a child to keep myself and others out of trouble. I was brought up in times when corporal punishment was still legal in schools, lying was not unusual.

So Capsium- you would never lie under any circumstance?

I would hope not to be put in the situation where I felt I had to full. I think I would to protect others in certain circumstances, a life or death situation for example, like when German people hid Jewish people in WW2 to protect them.

But lying to protect somebody against the somebody who would cause them harm is not against my Christian beliefs, either, because we are also taught not to act as a 'stumbling block' which causes another person to sin.

"k Christian values can sometimes encourage you to take a more challenging path. That is not to say that a non christian may not have done the same things for different reasons."

So long as the choices you made were the ones that best protected the happiness and mental health of your children and yourself then they were obviously the right ones. If they were made primarily because you felt that they were the ones God expected, then I hope that God's wishes and the happiness and mental health of you and your children coincide.

Hak, there is a large part of me that worries that my children having regular contact with grandparents who are anti-Christian, controlling, dysfunctional and often downright unpleasant, might not be the best thing but I think that showing my children that whatever people say or do to you and however badly they treat you, you continue to try and show them Gods love and care, is a more important lesson for them. My mother in law has already given my 12 year old daughter a book about a child escaping from his repressive Christian upbringing. That is fine.as we will just discuss it after and it in no ways reflects my daughters life, but probably reflects what my mother-in-law thinks her grand-daughters life is like!
We obviously hope and pray that through seeing them regularly and being their to support them in their old age, they will see that our faith is real and not oppressive. We hope for them that their grandkids might bring them some joy and replace some of the bitterness,suspicion and negativity that surrounds them. For what it is worth,I think my MIL has been chronically depressed without seeking help but I am not yet in a place where I could approach that with her(and might never be)
Being in a situation where your children are in contact with registered sex offenders is also a risk. As well as my relative,we have a friend who is on the sex offenders register. We normally see him in a group/church situation and would ensure he is never unsupervised near a child. I want my children to learn to show care to everybody, whatever their problems. This obviously means I also have to teach my children personal safety and would ensure they knew enough to take extra care around certain people.

can't believe I put 'being their' rather than 'there'. Apologies to those who get upset by these things!!

Hey, I.was an atheist and found myself 'pulled' to church. I would now call that a prompt by the holy spirit. My advice is to open a bible! Read Romans. Pray before reading and ask God to give you faith.. There'll be lots of good books to read on faith but start with God's book and work from there. I pray that God would show you his truth x

cadenz- maybe "gods's" truth, but not the truth.
Nothing to show that the whole thing is just a fanciful made up story.

You've still been unable to demonstrate something that is specific and distinct from everything else which sets the role of a faith apart from just learning from experience.

I appreciate that all christians come from a different background but even with the same text they are coming to opposing conclusions. One christian says 'before I was a Christian I didn't think gay people should be able to marry but God has shown me that he wants them to have equal rights' and yet another Christian in the same church says 'before I was a Christian I supported gay rights but God has shown me that gay relationships are not his will' why is God telling them different things.

Two people studying GCSE maths will not come to wildly different conclusions at the end of two years. As mere humans we are able to devise a way to communicate a clear set of instructions but God couldn't.

a prompt by the holy spirit

Why doesn't the Holy Spirit prompt people in Afghanistan to go to a church instead of a mosque?

vdbfamily- you are very brave and "faithful" in your choices.

However, I find it very difficult to come to terms with a God who asks you to put your young children in situations which must be very difficult for them- it's a bit too Abraham and Isaac for me. Your in laws sound, from your description, horrible. Why can't God find a way to teach them to be less horrible without making life unpleasant for you and your children too?

I have to admit, I'm very pleasantly surprised to hear that none of the Christians on Mumsnet think the bible is of any value.

Where did you hear that Big? I have read this whole thread and haven't read any posts from Christians that say the bible has no value.. Perhaps you can point me to them.

I think the point being made was that when discussing unpalatable passages christians say that those bits aren't what actually happened/don't reflect god's nature because god didn't actually inspire those bits and it was just human musings. But they are happy to accept verbatim the acceptable bits such as being kind to others and going to heaven and god loving us. Here are some of the quotes that illustrate the above reasoning when reading the horrid bits:

*A discerning of that truth is required. Full appreciation and understanding is a lifelong process. (even though no two christians agree, and there is no consensus)

The Bible is a collection of books written by people, over centuries about their understanding of a god. (so it was human inspired and they could be wrong, as humans often are)

(some of) the authors were inspired by the Holy Ghost (couldn't god say which ones?)

Inspired yes, channelled no (which means ^nasty bits=man's poor attempt at explanation and not what actually happened nice bits=straight from god's mouth and to be accepted at face value)*

But I used to do it so I do appreciate how quickly and automatically you overlay that filter when reading the horrid bits.

head there should not be a problem with this. The same source of inspiration can inspire a variety of actions in people. Two people could know the same person in life but there may be variance in their descriptions and of them. This does not alter the fact they both know the same person or that their experience of them is not real. This is why contextual understanding is important.

It is not true to say there is no consensus in Christianity, at all. If it was Christianity, as a particular faith, would be unrecognisable. The Nicene Creed is the consensus that most Christian denominations would agree with.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_creed