had my faith very aggressively tested tonight.

[SpaceDinosaur]

This is not about the action, I'm fine with what happened. This is about how I feel now.

What's just happened.
I gave a friend a lift home as I was driving and he was quite drunk.
Midway home he asked how we (group of friends) cope with a mutual friend being religious...she's getting married in a church.
I replied that I was religious, he attended my church wedding 6 months ago.
"You can't be religious, you're supposed to be intelligent"
Sorry?
"You're a scientist, you have an analytical mind, why are you acting like a brainwashed idiot?"
God love him he loves a soap box so I was then treated to a tirade of how there was no God, how if there was a God we would be perfect, how God couldn't exist because of the diseases babies in Africa die of. (That was his pet topic)

No responses from me were heard so I allowed him to rant himself out including a full session of calling God all the names under the sun, asking God to smite or kill him now and laughing at me.

I am at peace with the event. Shocked but not upset. He'll apologise for being so aggressive, confrontational and rude tomorrow (if he remembers)

I felt tested. I wanted to come home and open my bible and see where it fell (something I did a lot as a teenager) but I can't find it which makes me sad. I wanted to find the verse and chapter about not testing God.

I would like to ask for a verse or chapter to read. I have a digi bible. I can't explore the book, I can't find it right now.

I think a lot of the misunderstandings about what faith is and isn't comes about because we are often talking about different things. The faith of a child who believes what they are told by parents is not the same as the faith of a mature adult who has gone through the questioning stages that you expect as a person matures. My faith as I live through my sixth decade is not that of the child loving the stories at Sunday school, or the angry questioning of my teenage years or the rediscovered certainty of my young adulthood. The Stephen Cotterell snippet that Edith quoted really resonates with me. The important part about faith is that it grows and changes and questions.

I suspect some atheists assume that all Christians have the childlike unquestioning faith they have left behind. It isn't the case but you can see how it happens. I did a study weekend on conflict resolution and fundamentalism once and what was fascinating was that the first step out of fundamentalist, I'm right and you are wrong, black and white thinking is to try and understand the other point of view. In other words to walk in someone else's shoes. It requires maturity, empathy and an openness to the good in the other even if you do not agree with them which at its best MN enables. But not always.

That was a beautiful post. I think it's great having a place to discuss ideas and the big topics. I agree that faith matures and changes as we grow older, that is, as long as we engage with our doubts and don't sweep them to under the carpet.

Faith is a belief in something without proof. This never changes however mature you become, its the same for children believing in Santa to adults believing the earth is only 6000 years old or aliens are abducting us and probing our bottoms.

Going "through the questioning stages" in some people leads to rational conclusions. For others they start from the point of already believing and so their "chosen questions" are only to reinforce their beliefs. Confirmation bias is an common observable fact.

I did not suggest that all thiests believe in the same way as a child does but they do have faith in the same way a child does. The difference is that over time an adult builds up elaborate stories surrounding their beliefs, congregates in groups with like minded stories, finds a way to spin everything that contradicts their beliefs, reads lots of books supporting their ideas and creates a mental state that is dependant upon their beliefs. But buried at the bottom of the core where thoughts rarely challenge is the fact that their belief is based on a faith that has no proof (which is what this thread is about).

maturity, empathy and an openness to the good in the other even if you do not agree with them is a great thing to have but bears no connection to the proof of anyones beliefs.

My faith is based on research, studying history, reading the bible, challenging conversations and prayer. That is exactly what all religions say, yet we know they aren't all true, which is why they are called faiths because they are not proven to be true.

I can't even find proof the individual called jesus existed, never mind was resurrected by supernatural means.

Urban, to an extent you are right, a person's faith cannot be proven beyond all doubt, otherwise it would be fact not faith.

But there is a lot of evidence that Jesus existed, even if you don't believe he was the son of God. In the days after his death his followers began telling people he was alive, and managed to convince many others. This didn't sit well with the people who had Jesus executed so they chased the main instigators out of Jerusalem.
Undeterred these men scattered throughout the Roman Empire and continued convincing people that Jesus is the Messiah. A new religion sprung up and spread rapidly.
To keep in touch and to teach one another about this new faith the leaders sent letters to one another and would then make copies and send them out to other believers.
As a result we have more historically reliable documents about these times than we do for any other ancient document.

Here is a link that shows how the New Testament documents compare to other texts.

stephensizer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/MartinezR02.gif

So again, this doesn't prove Jesus was the son of God, but it is pretty certain the man existed and that his death sparked a radical movement throughout the Roman Empire and beyond.

I was raised an athiest. I am not an athiest because I questioned what I was raised to assume. It goes both ways.

I am not religious either, for me personally I think religions are cultural constructions.

But I cannot accept that the phenomenon in which religions based their constructions are also a human construction or a brain based illusion. People make sense of the unkown, they have done for centuries, religions are constructions to do just this.

But the unknown needs to exist for people to construct meaning from it. Some people assume the things we don't know have currently unknown natural explanations but they also assume that these explanations must fit into their cultural construction of what "natural" can and cannot be.

I think what is natural is much broader than we can imagine or comprehend. What we think is currently supernatural is not supernatural at all. It is just nature that falls outside our own limited knowledge of nature. It has just as much chance of being part of the universe as the things that we can observe and comprehend.

Lumpylumperson, I did not say Jesus did not exist, I said there isn't proof he did and I have looked, its an area I was/am interested in. I made the point because it goes to showing faith is belief without proof.

In Strobel’s "The Case for Christ" everyone interviewed in his book is a committed Christian, that's the confirmation bias I was talking about earlier. He makes straw man arguments and many statements but there is no unbiased journalism.

"Who Moved The Stone?", by Frank Morison was advertised as a sceptic trying to prove the bible wrong, but he did in fact go to church before he wrote the book. It's a fundamentalist work written from the standpoint that everything in the Gospels must be accepted as historical fact. Morison does not supply evidence to support his claims that the Gospels are history. His book consists largely of speculation and fantasy. It is more a historical novel than a serious study of the problems of the Gospels. He deals with contradictions and inconsistencies by either ignoring them, or postulating anything, however superficial, which lets him gloss over difficulties.

Hence my point there isn't even proof Jesus existed, never mind resurrected.

littlejeopardy, you made a few statements and you didn't cite any evidence because your link is nonsense. When something was written and how many were printed has no bearing on the veracity of its contents. Secondly where is the evidence that the authors were eye witnesses to what happened, we don't even know who the authors of the gospels were.

Hence my point there isn't even proof an ordinary person called Jesus existed.

dizzytomato, "It goes both ways". Yes you can be indoctrinated at any age.

Just to correct you, no one is raised an atheist, atheism is NOT a belief system.

Your point seems to be that there is something out there you just don't know what it is, some people call it religion, you call it a phenomenon?

Some people used to call the wind in the trees spirits, we investigated and found it was wind. What natural effect is happening that we don't know what is causing it? You're describing the god of the gaps, who is pretty much dead! But its of little relevance because this thread is about a mature developed system of supernatural beliefs not an unknown force of nature.

Actually when documents were written and how many early copies still exist do have a bearing on veracity as it helps historians answer the question 'did the original audience accept this text as truth?'

The New Testament books were written within 50ish years after Jesus' death which means the events of the text were written within living memory of the people involved. Other questions historians look at are
Does the author claim to be an eye witness?
Does the author make themselves appear too good to be true?
Does the text agree with other historical and archaeological evidence?

I would say the Bible holds up pretty well under the historical scrutiny applied to all ancient texts.

Didn't the Romans record proof of Jesus's existence?

Although even if he did exist there's no proof of his resurrection. And giving that no one has seen anyone come back from the dead since then it's reasonable to assume he didn't.

Faith without doubt isn't much of a faith imo. Phillip Yancey in "The Jesus I Never Knew" is quite good on that.

And yes 'God of the gaps' is a rubbish proof of God's existence. (Understandable pre-enlightenment maybe but not now).

Some atheists seem very intent on trying to prove that there was never someone called Jesus. So much so that it almost becomes a belief in itself....

Just to correct you, no one is raised an atheist, atheism is NOT a belief system.

A belief is an opinion. I think you are confusing athiests with agnostics. Athiesm is not the knowledge that there is/are no god/gods, so therefore it is an opinion or belief that there is not or cannot be a god or gods. If an athiest parent tells their child that there is no god or that it is highly unlikely that there are gods then they are raising their child to have the same opinion/belief.

My mother is an athiest. My father on the other hand is agnostic, he didn't tell me anything because being agnostic he has no beliefs or assumption of knowledge. Then I agree with you, you cannot raise a child as agnostic. But an athiest parent will very often tell their child, at some point, why they don't believe in god or gods.

Urban have you read Jesus for the non-religious by John Shelby Spong, or The Bible by Karen Armstrong?

I don't know if Jesus existed or not and quite honestly I don't think about it either way. Even if he was made up, whoever made up the teachings deserves credit for going beyond the cultural norms of the time and raising awareness of the need for change. Some of the teachings of Jesus apply just as much today as they did then. Exposing Jesus as a myth serves no purpose IMO.

I would agree that atheism is a belief system that you can raise children in.

I also agree that there is a big difference between believing Jesus existed and believing he was raised from the dead. I do believe in the resurrection but I am aware that it is an extraordinary thing to believe! I think sometimes Christians need to remember that we are the strange ones!

(that's not directed at OP who sounds very respectful and considerate in discussing her faith)

Atheism is a not a belief system.

It's like calling "non stamp collecting" a hobby.
Atheism is a lack of belief.

littlejeopary could you tell us something about the doctrine of this faith called atheism?

I thought that atheism is the certain belief that there is/are no God/Gods. Which goes a step further than not knowing whether there is a God or not.

Im happy to be corrected if that is not the case.

Atheism is the lack of belief in god, otherwise I could have a belief in a million other things I don't think exist.

"To view atheism as a belief in itself would require us to create many other such words to describe other “positive non-beliefs”. Dragons, for example. If we are to subscribe to the atheism as a belief concept then we’re going to need to explicitly label those who don’t believe in dragons. Oh, and the Easter bunny too.

Who would go around actively disbelieving in the infinite number of things that are preposterous? Here’s one of my favorite quotes on the matter:

If atheism is a belief then not collecting stamps is a hobby."

Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods. An agnostic either believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a god or is noncommittal on the issue.