Doubt

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith, for they keep it awake and moving. And when our faith is strongest, we believe both with our hearts as well as with our heads.

Nothing exists but natural phenomena...no supernaturals forces, no supernatural entities...nature simply exists.  Matter is.

Deliberate, definite, dogmatic denial of the existence of God. It is not satisfied with approximate truth or relative truth but claims to see the INS and outs of the game quite clearly, being the absolute denial of the absolute.

Doubt everything. Find your own light.

I am surrounded by Christians. They are generally speaking a pleasant and agreeable lot, not noticeably different from other people—even though they ...have killed off more people than all other people put together. Yet I cannot be sure they don't have the truth. But if they have the truth, why is it the case that they are repellent precisely to the degree that they embrace and advertise the truth? One might even become a Christian if there were few if any Christians around.

Trust, but verify.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? Douglas Adams quoted in Richard Dawkins’ The God delusion

It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what's going on.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

From Cambridge to California, a growing number of scientists are becoming more open to theological considerations...a drift prompted, they say, by recent advances in biology, particle physics and especially cosmology.

Ever since Darwin, we have bought into the idea that humans evolved from ancient, chimp-like creatures. That’s because modern chimps seem to share a lot of anatomy and behavior with we humans. So the idea that we evolved from something like chimps seems to make sense. But now, the discovery of ardipithecus shows that this is totally and completely wrong.

I'm afraid God is speaking but no one is listening.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

What is the question? If there is no question, there is no answer.

If one puts aside the existence of God and the survival after life as too doubtful...one has to make up one's mind as to the use of life. If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what I am here form and how in these circumstance I must conduct myself. Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning.

Postmodernism opens with the sense of irrevocable loss and incurable fault—a death that 'begins' with the death of God and 'ends' with the death of ourselves. We are in a time between times and a 'place which is no place.'

Will my eyes adjust to this darkness? Will I find you in the dark – not in the streaks of light which remain, but in the darkness? Has anyone ever found you there? Did they love what they saw? Did they see love? And are there songs for singing when the light has gone dim? Or in the dark, is it best to wait in silence? Noon has darkened. As fast as they could say, ‘He’s dead,’ the light dimmed. And where are you in the darkness? I learned to spy you in the light. Here in this darkness, I cannot find you. If I had never looked for you, or looked but never found, I would not feel this pain of your absence. Or is not your absence in which I dwell, but your elusive troubling presence? It’s the neverness that is so painful. Never again to be here with us – never to sit with us at the table…. All the rest of our lives we must live without him. Only our death can stop the pain of his death.

Faith is a footbridge that you don't know will hold you up over the chasm until you're forced to walk out onto it.

How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? You have allowed rivers of blood to flow, mountains of suffering to pile up, sobs to become humanity's song--all without lifting a finger that we could see. You have allowed bonds of love beyond number to be painfully snapped. If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself. We strain to hear. But instead of hearing an answer we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn. Through our tears we see the tears of God.

Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.

[God] is a [useful] hypothesis to keep order in the world so that if he didn't exist, he would have to be invented. -

Quote: You know, more and more I think that for many years I looked at life like a case at law, a series of proofs. When you’re young you prove how brave you are, or smart; then, what a good lover; then, a good father; finally, how wise, or powerful or what-the-hell-ever. But underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. That I was moving on and upward path toward some elevation, where — God knows what — I would be justified, or even condemned—a verdict anyway. I think now that my disaster really began when I looked up one day—and the bench was empty. No judge in sight. And all that remained was the endless argument with oneself—this pointless litigation of existence before an empty bench. Which, of course, is another way of saying—despair. And, of course, despair can be a way of life; but you have to believe in it, pick it up, take it to heart, and move on again. Instead, I seem to be hung up… And the days and the months and now the years are draining away.

The first thing that drew me in was disbelief. What? Humanity sins but it’s God’s Son who pays the price?….

shadow passed over Saruman’s face; then it went deathly white. Before he could conceal it, they saw through the mask the anguish of a mind in doubt, loathing to stay and dreading to leave its refuge. For a second he hesitated, and no one breathed. Then he spoke, and his voice was shrill and cold. Pride and hate were conquering him.

But anxiety, as Niebuhr observes, is only the context for sin, not its cause. Our base problem is unbelief. Failing to trust in the infinite God, we live anxiously, restlessly, always trying to secure and extend ourselves with finite goods that can’t take the weight we put on them.

Unbelief, says Niebuhr, yields anxiety, which yields alternating pride and sensuality.

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.

Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid. I thought how terrible the nights must have been in a time when men knew the things were there and were deadly. But no, that's wrong. If I knew they were there, I would have weapons against them, charms, prayers, some kind of alliance with forces equally strong but on my side. Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.