The Pain of Abandoning One’s Faith!

 

Author’s Note

 

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”  

 

RENÉ DESCARTES 

 

Reflections

 

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever stopped to think how painful it must be for a person to lose his faith? You cannot help but empathize with people who have been agonized with doubt and uncertainty, forcing them to reconsider and often abandon their faith. This is not a new phenomenon but has been around since antiquity. People have struggled with their belief system since the Stone Age when they began using religion to help them understand their daily existence.

 

But before we get into why it is so difficult for a formerly religious person to lose their faith, let’s discuss the term faith and what it means. The word faith can be defined in several ways: complete trust of confidence in someone or something; a strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof; a system of religious belief; a strongly held belief or theory.

 

When people share with others, they are having doubts about their faith, they are often told they need to pray about it and read their Bible so the Holy Spirit can help them understand and help them fight Satan and his demons who are trying to take away their faith.

 

Here is what a seminary professor shared about what she tells her students about doubts her student might encounter when studying the Bible:

 

I tell them I think the Bible is the word of humans about their experiences with God.  Those who can think can then realize that’s perhaps not exactly the same as saying it is the word of God.  

            Most people in today’s world have faith in a religious conviction or faith in another set of deeply held beliefs. A person’s faith defines who they are and influences their goals and motivations. So, what are the reasons for the beliefs one holds? According to some scholars, some of the reasons for religious beliefs include fear of death, a desire for meaning in one’s life, the need for moral structure, the need for community, the need to control others. This faith or system of beliefs is fragile and if attacked can cause a loss of faith, leading to depression, loneliness, and despair.

 

The process of disentangling oneself from religion can be very difficult. The loss of faith during this process of “spiritual transition” or “deconversion” can be extremely traumatic. Because all humans have a need for security the loss of comfort and security provided by a like-minded community can be extremely unsettling.

 

            To get a handle on what it means to lose one’s faith, we must first try to understand why people lose their faith. To do this I will give the perspective of religion, faith, and/or loss of faith from two atheists, a deist, a Jewish scholar, and a Christian fundamentalist.

 

Bart Ehrman is currently the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He labels himself as an atheistic agnostic or agnostic atheist. In his blog, he shared the following about his loss of faith:

 

Any of this sound familiar? You used to believe Jesus really did walk on water and magically fed thousands of people, but now you’re not so sure. You used to believe the Bible was without error, a perfect book reliable for all of life’s answers, but now you know otherwise. You used to believe that only people who accepted Jesus into their hearts would go to heaven when they die, but now you can’t stomach such a thought. And when you add up all these shifts in beliefs over the pastseveral years, you genuinely wonder “What happened to my faith?” and conclude that maybe, just maybe, you’ve lost it altogether. 

 

Amy Jill-Levine is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Department of Religious Studies, and Graduate Department of Religion. She is a self-described "Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Protestant divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt." In her book, The Misunderstood Jew – The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, Amy-Jill Levine offers this major difference between Judaism and Christianity:

 

For Christians, the claim that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life is obvious: it is proved by Jesus’s resurrection, confirmed by the Bible, and experienced by the soul. For Jews, claims of Jesus’s divine sonship and fulfillment of the messianic prophecies are false. Since we live in a world of cancer and AIDS, war and genocide, earthquakes and hurricanes, the messianic age cannot be here yet. Since there is no messianic age, obviously the messiah has not yet come.

 

Mike Phleban is a prior Pentecostal pastor, who after years of struggle lost his faith and now is an atheist. He gives us the following reason he lost his faith.

 

In the end, the one thing that did it for me was observing, as a pastor, how Christians lead their lives when they think nobody is watching. Because if there was one fundamental promise of Christianity that I kept sticking to after years of disappointment, it was that God is changing people’s lives. I could live with God not giving me my daily bread and not delivering me from evil – after all, it could always be because of his perfect heavenly plan that I am just too limited to comprehend. But the one thing that I thought the Bible is clear about is that he is supposed to change people for the better. Maybe not instantly, maybe not completely (not in this life anyway), but by the power of Holy Spirit people should be transformed into the glory of Christ, becoming better, more compassionate, more moral, more Christ-like. But nothing like that happens – in church, they just learn how to masquerade better. This was the final straw, the ultimate promise of the Bible that turned out to be false too. The whole house of theological fine print finally collapsed.

 

 

In his article, “Dissecting Christianity's Mind-Snaring System,” Stephen Van Eck, a long-time freethinker and Deist writer, offers this:

 

Once sucked into the parallel universe of Christianity, the adherent is too intimidated by the existing framework of threats and rationalizations to attempt escape. Even thinking along alternative lines will induce severe feelings of guilt. And should one run the risk of losing faith by examining its true foundations, he is certain to be chilled by the dictum, in Hebrews 6:4-6, that "It is impossible for those who were once enlightened...if they fall away, to renew them again..." Those who originated a religion based on deception and delusion clearly knew that if the conditioning broke down or wore off, it could not work again. But that's when the true enlightenment occurs.

 

 

            Randy Alcorn In his article, “Losing Your Faith May Be God’s Gift to You,”, Randy Alcorn says this:

 

As I told Chris, there are probably many people who need to lose their faith—because their faith is in the wrong thing. I believe God can use this crisis to topple our idols, including but not limited to the idols of health and wealth, and clear the way for us to embrace genuine trust in Christ.

So, let’s fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Let’s make Him the object of our faith. He will support us and sustain us and be there for us in a way that no other object of faith can.

 

It would seem, loss of faith is such a struggle because of our innate reason which demands to know and live-in truth. If there is a God, the search for knowledge, for reason and faith, is part of who we are. The truth indeed sets us free!

 

Silent Prayer

 

Creator God, thank you for allowing us to discover

the laws governing your creation! Help us to

understand the meaning of life and our part in it!

 

Music

 

I’m Losing My Religion – Lauren Daigle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIlnCfbaznE

 

LYRICS

 

I've been an actor on a stage
Playing a role I have to play
I'm getting tired to say the same
Living behind a masquerade

No more performing out of fear

I'm trying to keep my conscience clear
It all seems so insincere
I'd trade it all to meet You here

I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion

 

Light a match and watch it burn
To Your heart, I will return
No one can love me like You do
No-no-no-no-no
So why would I want a substitute?

 

I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion
To find You

I'm losing my religion

In finding something new
'Cause I need something different
And different looks like You

I'm losing my religion

In finding something new
'Cause I need something different
And different looks like You

Oh, I'm losing my religion

I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion
To find You

To find You
To find You
To find You
You

 

 

Barry