Side Comments on Progress after the Royal Society Conference

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@lee_merrill

@Rumraket

@lee_merrill

I believe I recommended a prayer to start with, “God, if you’re real, would you reveal yourself to me?”

Genuinely doing this sincerely is among the reasons I stoppped believing in my mid-twenties. That is to say, though I always had doubts I was already a believer back then, but went through an extended period of analysing the basis for my faith. It sort of culminated with the realization I could never fully convince myself and stop doubting without something concrete and compelling.

Spoiler: nothing happened. God didn’t reveal himself.

Now it’s your turn to rationalize why it didn’t happen with some ad-hoc story you can’t substantiate and will almost certainly be false.

I’m sorry that happened, now I can’t claim to know your case well enough to describe it, but I can say I had the same wrestling with doubts, and reading apologetics, notable C.S. Lewis’ book Miracles, a Preliminary Study helped me a lot. But even after reading a lot of apologetics (I mean, a lot!), and even after experiencing a number of healings, some of them dramatic, and even after God answering my prayer for him to do X for me, if he cared for me, and X happened, my faith wasn’t growing like I had hoped. Very odd, and unexpected, I know.

But all that changed, when I stopped praying seeking insight and help, and instead started recently to pray “Who are you, Lord?” Kind of along the lines of “If you are real, reveal yourself to me,” I started seeking not to strengthen my faith directly, but indirectly, seeking to know God better.

The more you know someone, the more you will trust them, if they’re trustworthy. That’s what I recommend now, God is a person, not a set of propositions. Evidence for propositions can be helpful, but they’re no substitute for seeking and developing a relationship…

Those sorts of responses are just a second layer to the reasons why I stopped believing. This is basically saying I just gotta believe and keep talking to God as if he is real, even when what I am saying is that this doesn’t do it for me and I couldn’t keep engaging in these sorts of one-way communications where I forever tried to give myself rationalizations for why nothing ever came back.

Bro you just got to ask the right questions. You just got to believe. You have to keep looking for signs and message. You have to keep trying. You just got to be worthy, act in the right way, be patient, etc. etc.

They were all just stories I told myself, and the fact that all I got back when I explained this to other Christians was just more takes on new ways to tell myself stories was the final nail in the coffin.