...or believers of other faiths involving a god.

I am curious how people come to believe in God.

To all you people that want to post 'God doesn't exist' / 'its rubbish', please don't!
I am interested in how people came to have faith - there are plenty of other threads about God not existing!


Was there a specific moment/incident?
Did you 'just know'?
Because your family believe?

My family are almost entirely christian - including a couple of vicars & trainee vicars. I am a bit of a black sheep being agnostic.

I just want to understand how Christians (insert other faith here) come to believe.

I am aware of the christian teachings/bible to some level (as you might expect with a Christian family), I also see things from a scientific perspective (working in computers atm, have 2 degrees in science including biological science).

Feel free to PM me if you prefer.

If God didn't exist, we would have to invent him. He is an excellent concept until one begins to look closely. I think our Christian god is a bit of a sadist, letting all this bad stuff happen and not intervening. Perhaps he is busy elsewhere. 2000 years is probably the equivalent of a few seconds to him but then if he is omnipotent, he could do a lot better. Looks like we are stuck with him but other than sending his son to be nailed to a cross, he's been pretty quiet the last couple of Milennia. Answering a few prayers perhaps. Watching the Arsenal?

Have you ever asked your own family members why they became Christians ?

Have you ever asked your own family members why they became Christians ?
It probably wouldn't count, did you ever listen to your parents? :hihi:

A fair few I spoke to had religious experiences when in the countryside, in awe at its magnificence then concluding it to be evidence of Gods creation.

As for the Barrat homes and Little Chefs that remove it all, well no matter.

i had no choice in the matter,my parents took it upon themselves to have me christened,the school did the rest with morning assembly and r. e lessons

i had no choice in the matter,my parents took it upon themselves to have me christened,the school did the rest with morning assembly and r. e lessons
That is the same with most people, but they just teach you about religion.

You find god in your own way. IMO god is the presence within your own mind, which makes you what you are.
If you want to feel the presense of god, look at the stars on a clear still quiet night, realise the vastness of it and then you will sense the presense of god. Or go into a quiet cathedral, it has the same effect.
I do not follow any religion as non of them are for any other reason than keeping the rich at the top and the poor at the bottom.

There are many very religious people come on here, as may be seen from some of the discussions, but they have not found god, not by any means.
They are just indoctrinated with letter and word of their religions.
That is about as far from knowing god as it is possible to get.

Here endeth the lesson :D

I was christened but never took communion, and my parents left it to me as to whether I went to Church or not.

I went through my teens as a know everything, religion is crap, science is great, atheist.

I went through my twenties as a know less, religion may have soemthing going for it, science and materialism might not have all the answers, agnostic.

Somewhere in my 30s I realised that I knew sod all, that materialism, science, technology and the efforts of our political system were not actually fulfilling me, and soemwhere along the way I began to believe in God.

IN my 40s I've still not engaged with organised religion - I go to church occasionally, will use the Cathedral for private prayer, but on the whole don't quite know when it happened. I've never had any Damascene conversion - I think it's literally been the more I learnt about the world in which I lived, the more I saw people and how marvellously good or evil they can be - then I felt the existence of God in it all.

Sorry - not very helpful... I guess explaining faith is never easy. :)

My faith didn't come over night. It was certainly something I had been searching for although I'm not sure since when. That sounds a bit cliched I know, but that's the way it happened.

I absolutely hated religious education at school (then again, I hated most subjects at school) and used to take the mickey out of 'bible bashers'. In my own way though, I think I secretly admired these people who had a strong inner belief; I certainly admired those who didn't foister their faith upon me.

I became interested in Hinduism around 1989/90 and began reading the Bhagavad Gita. It gave me a feeling of security, a reason, and it also gave me hope in that once my life on earth expired, that wasn't necessarily the end. Unfortunately some of Hinduism's basic tenets, like abstaining from alcohol and being only allowed to have sex for pro-recreational reasons, I found too difficult. I did however turn vegetarian (albeit for one year).

But I found myself really at ease listening to Hindu music and burning incense late into the night. (This is the point where I taught myself Hindi.)

However, my interest wained but I still felt I was searching. My father passed away in 1998 and in a way removed my fear of death. And yet, after the tremendous loss of death, particularly of the man from whom I came and who brought me up, clothed me and fed me (not to say loved me considerably and unconditionally) came the ecstacy of the birth of my daughter a year and a half later. From such dreadful pain to such elation - two opposites.

It was then as a parent for the first time - and without my own father to turn to - that I realised in a way the pressure and responsibilities that were now on my own shoulders. I felt incredibly grateful that my wife and I now had a healthy, beautfiful child. I wanted to run to my father and tell him, thank him, for all he had done for me, but also for well needed advice. Alas, I couldn't: Dad was gone.

One Christmas after the birth of our second daughter, I was watching a programme on the Nativity and it inspired me to pick up a copy of the Bible. Suddenly, it felt as if everything I would need in life could be found in these words. I decided to buy a beginner's bible (with notes) and something clicked. Never more than now, I understood the reason for my being here, the reason why my father was no longer here; a reason why life continues and the family-line continues through the likes of my daughters.

I live a three minute walk from St. Luke's Church in Lodge Moor. I went. And then I went again. I felt a little uneasy at first but it brought to life some of the words I had begun to assimilate from the Bible. I then went on an Alpha Course and whilst it didn't answer all my questions, it was probably the honesty that took me by surprise. To some questions there are no real answers and I liked the fact that where there were difficult questions I wasn't given some 'make-do' answer.

I admit I'm not a regular church goer but I believe I'm a Christian despite my many, many faults. I don't push my faith on others because faith is a truly personal thing.

Funerals were cold, almost pointless affairs before I found my faith. I would stare at the ceiling whilst others sung hymns and said Amen. But after I'd become familiar with the Bible and with Jesus' words, it began to make things a little easier. In fact, I felt a comfortable hand holding mine during subsequent funerals and that came through the familiarity of scripture - for the first time, God's presense was tangible. For the first time ever, I cried at someone's funeral because a voice now told me it was okay to do so!

I have moments when I feel close to God and others when I reckon we're planets apart. In May this year on our tenth wedding anniversary, my wife and I renewed our wedding vows in York Minster - because I wanted to marry in the eyes of God (we initially married in a pub!). Strangely, life's been more difficult since then with my father-in-law passing away suddenly in July.

That's my faith - sorry if it's a long post!!

Ousetunes,
I found that a very moving, honest and open post and wanted to PM you to say so, but your box was full, so I'll say it here. Thanks.

Have you ever asked your own family members why they became Christians ?

Family have been Christian as long as I know, not sure I would really feel comfortable asking them about it. It does get discussed occasionally when I visit my sister/brother-in-law.

i had no choice in the matter,my parents took it upon themselves to have me christened,the school did the rest with morning assembly and r. e lessons

I was taken to church most weekends with my parents until I was old enough to say no and be left at home. I found church so incredibly boring.

Same for RE/assembly, but that only teaches you the words/stories and IMO cannot make you Christian as that requires development of personal faith.

I went through my teens as a know everything, religion is crap, science is great, atheist.

I went through my twenties as a know less, religion may have soemthing going for it, science and materialism might not have all the answers, agnostic.

...I realised that I knew sod all, that materialism, science, technology and the efforts of our political system were not actually fulfilling me...

I guess that's about sums up how I feel atm.


...Sorry - not very helpful... I guess explaining faith is never easy. :)
Far from easy - but definately a helpful reply ;)

1st - no problem with people having a religion, just when religion becomes fundamentalist and people abdicate responsibility to a power seeker.

------

If you'd like a laugh, do a search for 'intelligent falling'

Evangelical science in America says gravity doesn't exist, its just God keeps us on the planets surface.

Apparantly gravity doesn't explain everything, like...

How angels fly
How Jesus ascended to heaven.
Why and how Satan fell after being banished.

Give some people enough rope...
Maybe they don't hang themselves, but they can become a laughing stock.

1st - no problem with people having a religion, just when religion becomes fundamentalist and people abdicate responsibility to a power seeker.

------

If you'd like a laugh, do a search for 'intelligent falling'

Evangelical science in America says gravity doesn't exist, its just God keeps us on the planets surface.

Apparantly gravity doesn't explain everything, like...

How angels fly
How Jesus ascended to heaven.
Why and how Satan fell after being banished.

Give some people enough rope...
Maybe they don't hang themselves, but they can become a laughing stock.

This post may be more at home on the 'Does God exist' thread. Please don't get in to that debate here.

I was very fortunate in as much as I came from a Christian background. Sometimes I was dragged to church and I went through all the usual childhood tantrums. Church was so boring, I remember when we lived in West Bromwich, we had some rhubarb in the back garden and my mother would take a stick of rhubarb to church and a paper bag with some sugar in it and during the sermon I would sit on the back row dipping the rhubarb in the sugar and eating it, the rattling of the paper bag must have made a real racket, then came the colouring books and word games just to pass the time on and when I became interested in girls, my only motivation for going to church was the talent.

Something of what I had heard must have stayed with me and I started to read the Bible on a regular basis, a chapter a day of the New Testament to begin with and slowly realisation began to dawn that the Bible addressed the spiritual side of my nature which being young and having my life in front of me had little appeal, I only wanted to enjoy myself but I began to realise that my time on earth was of little consequence and what happened to my physical body was my own doing and would be unimportant when my life ended anyway.

At first I understood little of what I read and it didn’t make much sense but eventually it began to come together and passages I had read before, that hadn't meant much to me at the time took on a new meaning and I began to see realised there was more to life than I could see and touch, and that there was a whole spiritual dimension out there that would continue when I was dead but it didn’t matter because it was all taken care of and I had nothing at all to worry about and all I needed to do was to place myself in his loving care, and although things may not be so great in the here and now there was a future in which there would be no pain, no sadness, and no worry and how could this happen unless there was someone or something in this other dimension that is so stupendous that only an eternal being could achieve something so amazing.

Just to add that I’m sixty-one now and I have proved God’s faithfulness time and time again and I am so glad I didn’t reject him when I was young.

I started believing in God after reading a Dan Brown novel.



That's not strictly true of course, but what it did do was to finally separate Church from Faith in my mind.
I considered myself an atheist because the Church seems such an obviously man-made construction, from the make-up of the bible to the buildings themselves.

Then I realised that it didn't matter about all the Churchy stuff; it didn't mean that God doesn't exist; and when I take a walk or a bike ride into the Peaks alone, I think He probably does.

The God I've started to believe in would appear to be a Christian type God (whether that's because I lack the imagination to conceive of another I don't know), a creator who watches over but doesn't intervene much.

I don't think it has made a big difference to the way I live my life, but it's good to resolve these things and move forward.

a wise old soldier once told me " there are no atheists in a shell hole son "

after that,i realised god is where you find him