Skip to main content

I love to read Neil Carter's pieces on Patheos. He always says what I am thinking.  

 

 

I didn’t quit believing in God because my prayers didn’t get answered, so let’s get that out of the way before we get started on this topic.  While I’m at it, let me reassure you that I also didn’t quit believing because something bad happened to me.  I feel like I lived a pretty charmed life right up until the moment I started telling people I no longer believe. That’s when things started heading south for me.  And contrary to an oft-quoted but completely incorrect statement of Brennan Manning, I didn’t quit believing because of the misbehavior of Christians.  Christians only tell each other that because they’re looking for moralistic leverage over one another and they get a lot of mileage out of guilting each other about “hurting their witness.”

No, like most former believers I quit believing because the reasons I had been given for believing as a youth just weren’t as persuasive to me in the light of full-grown adulthood.  I took longer to reach that point than many of my friends. I was in my mid-30″s before I came to grips with my own inner skeptic after many years of putting him in his place.  When your whole life has been built around a set of propositions, it becomes less and less likely that you’ll objectively evaluate those beliefs because the cost of quitting them can be enormously high.  Most just learn to fake it till they make it.  I couldn’t lie to myself like that, so here I am.

But I still talk about prayer because people around me keep talking about it, and they seem hidebound to believe that praying for things will make things happen, regardless of how routinely that’s not the case.



Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/g...rayer/#ixzz3RC1SUhup

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/g...2/08/no-true-prayer/

Original Post

Add Reply

Post

Untitled Document
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×