Starting to lose faith in my religion

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Some miracles I know are miracles but I can't proove to others. Example. God can send me a vision. Anything between several months to years can pass then one day I walk right into the vision just the way I saw it in detail. But when I first saw the vision I would be thinking "How is that possible?" and I could not make it out.

playgroundlover for your own sanity don't wait for miracles to happen, just do what you can

I looked at the site. I want to make sure we're looking at the same objective information here and I'm not missing anything. I see they've found some archaeological evidence that Sodom and Gomorrah burned. Okay...so what's the bigger point here?

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@playgroundlover22695:
-Some of this may be because you might be "cherry-picking" (selecting and emphasizing some things but not others... (ie) you don't mention the story of Job...which would be very relevant to your post),

-Some of this may be because you are taking things literally that were meant to be metaphors, or meant to be explanations of what faith is, or meant to be a way things are hoped for **but not guaranteed**,

-Some of this may be one of those moments where you're discerning between the teachings of Jesus and what the Church teaches (a difference which is a compromise to the practical necessities of maintaining a large organization), and

-Some of this, that you've written, sounds like you're bargaining with God and looking for a "reward" or influence over God for having "faith".

Faith is what one thinks. It has no currency (financial value). It can't be traded for something else (like saving a life, making it rain, changing the time something happens).

Questioning one's faith is a very good thing; even if this means also questioning what or how one is being taught. Your questioning is a requirement for developing a mature faith that will help you in the future.
Not questioning one's faith is a sure sign one is "stuck" and not progressing toward a fully mature faith.

At this point, I'm tempted to suggest that all religions are inspired by the Creator as a way to appreciate Him and His creation of the universe. So, being one religion vs another is not important. This competition to "please God" in order to win wars or be more popular is so unnecessary and destructive.

At this point, I'm also tempted to suggest that the various denominations, of the various religions, are silly, unnecessary, and do nothing to serve anyone but the various organizations' prestige. But that riles people up so I won't say that. LOL.[/quote]
I'd like to start out by saying really appreciate all of the support you guys are giving me on here. It really helps to know other people understand and care enough to take the time to respond.
When you say I should elaborate on the story of the job, what do you mean? Are you referring to what my job was with this little boy and why it meant so much to me? I know bargaining with God doesn't seem like the best plan but it's just hard when you know God loves all but yet he causes all this pain at once. I hear the argument of some posters which was that God himself doesn't cause the pain, the people do. However, here's the thing. My uncle was very healthy up until he got the cancer. How did that happen? God decided it was time for him to have the cancer. The boy's cat. God decided the cat was old enough to cross over the rainbow and when God made the boy, he gave the boy clinical depression. It was also God who decided my mom should have another stroke this past May, and finally, it's God who continues to see me as strong enough to handle all of this. Some guy ran past my mother and I on our way to the beach last week and he said "Wow! She's got it all!" She meaning me. My mother then very briefly rubbed my back and told me I did have it all because I'm so strong and brave. FYI: I'm not! I just try to hide my pain by acting grouchy or sometimes even pleasant so as not to burden others with it. Also, I cry a lot less now because I've replaced crying with toxins and sometimes a back strack if I need it before bed.
This morning my mom woke me up at 8:30AM and I was shocked. I had no idea what time it was at first and I was exhausted. I did not want to get out of my nice comfy bed with my cuddly dolly. I did though because I had work online from 9:30-10:15 and then we had to go visit my memmere to support her through the deaths that took place yesterday. All morning I literally just felt like I could easily plop back down on my bed and instantly fall back asleep for several more hours, even after I got dressed. But, I didn't. We went out today and came home and I did a few things. I'm still very tired and will likely go to bed shortly. Then it's up and adam first thing tomorrow morning again.

Job is a book in the bible (he's a person, it's pronounced like "Joe" with a b on the end).

It's a book about how to reconcile humanity's suffering, evil (bad things) etc with God's existence. It doesn't offer any particularly good answers...that I'm aware of. God basically just says that he is God and created everything blah blah...doesn't explain why innocent people are hurt. It's because there is no answer -- humans don't know exactly...at least not at this point in history (when the bible was written). The biblical God is a reflection of humanity's ignorance of science and knowledge during biblical times...

The bible...what your religion is based on...is an antiquated text. It's extremely old. We now know more about the universe, the cosmos, basically science has given us understanding...and we've proven that the bible is filled with nonsense...

Thank you. I needed this advice. By the way just for a side note, does anyone have any good tips on how to scratch your back without a traditional back scratcher or a hairbrush? I always find that a hairbrush is too prickly and sometimes just makes it worse without being able to thoroughly reach every spot. I don't have any skin condition but sometimes if my back gets a little itchy at bedtime I like to scratch it and well you know how this goes. You scrape the brush onto the itchy spot and all it does is make the whole rest of the back itch. Not very relaxing at all.

Spiritual people see our similarities.
Religious people see our differences.

I'm not sure what to say about the faith aspect of this post. Given that I am an atheist, I don't think I should be tossing my thoughts into the mix. I'm sorry things are tough right now. I hope you can find some peace and calm asap.

I might be able to help with the back scratching though. My go to is a ball point pen. Click the top down so you don't draw on yourself and use that side to attack the itchiness. That's my go to for spots I can't reach.

Actually that is very true. It makes perfect sense in my experience and it is logical. Perfectly logical.

I also find I have a sensitive back. If my Mum scratches my back, I tell her "No... Be gentle!" and she says "I'm hardly touching your back".
My Mum is the complete opposite. I could almost use a wire brush ad she would say "Scratch harder, I'm itchy!"
I seem to feel every small thing that touches me and I can feel the blood going through my veins quite often, especially in my legs.

Of course I'm not going to be the best one to help you with your religion either...in the sense of getting your faith back. I questioned my faith when I was 8 years old or so, and this is eventually where I ended up. I hope you do not get it back, because I believe it's important for people in this age to see religion for what it is (a flawed invention of humans from rather primitive times, which turns a blind eye to science and knowledge), and many of such religions are counter-productive to the advancement of civilization.

However, I do hope you maintain faith in your life, your future, etc. It's good to have a positive outlook because it empowers you and those you're connected to. You'll start to see what is possible for yourself and you'll work to bring about the changes you want to see in your world. Often things do work out for the best, and you can trust that even unfortunate situations do often have redeeming qualities and will improve with time. You can talk to others about miracles and divine interventions etc in their lives and how to bring these about through prayer, if that is in fact something you want to pursue. For me it's too irrational and so I choose to focus on other things, i.e. the physical world where all things seem to have a rational explanation.

I was raised Catholic. I grew agnostic in my adult life. I just grew tired of repeating "I believe" where the right words would have been "I doubt". I can't switch my systematic doubt off, it is part of me being. Also, I get triggered by any form of "us vs them" mentality that unfortunately is common in religious groups.
I think there is a lot of good and wisdom in The Gospels. I think we all should try to be the best human beings we can and jakoś to będzie.

I have religious "war" in my mind, especially between Catholicism and Quran-based religion(s). I have fascination about "coincidences". I experience them since almost 6 years and some people think that "coincidences" are delusions or symptoms of schizophrenia, a mental illness.

For my mind the idea of eternal damnation is absolutely absurdal and obviously against the truth that God is loving, goog, forgiving, gracious, merciful, omnibenevolent. But I have to believe in it regardless of the believing in Catholicism or Quran. My mentality "hates" the Quran because it considers it the most dangerous trick of Satan due to flood of "coincidences" associated with its text! Dependencies in Quran really appears to be unexplainable even for me as a Catholic. Many of them are quite complicated. But some are rather easy to notice. In chapter 18, verse 39 there are Arabic letters [N, T, R, N] one after another and the neutron is about 1839 times heavier than electron. What is more, in chapter 18, verse 37 there are letters [B, A, R, T, N] one after another (when we read Arabic text backwards), these letters are similar to consonants in English word "proton" (in Arabic there is no letter "p" and "b" is voiced counterpart of "p"), proton is about 1837 times heavier than electron. It really gives my mentality to think.

Losing your faith isn't a bad thing. I know that t first it can seem scary. But as someone who has been through that, I can assure you that you'll feel much easier once you make it over that hurdle. Compared to the times when I was still a believer, I now feel like a huge burden has been lifted off my chest. I no longer live in fear of invisible eyes watching and recording every moment of my life and judging me for it, or in the constant fear of burning in Hell after I die. I now have the freedom to live life on my own terms, instead of having to live up to whatever purpose religion assigns to me. My life is far from perfect, but it is much better now. And once I freed my mind of religious indoctrination, I can now see clearly the fallacies that religion relies upon so heavily.

Apologists love to tout that nobody can prove that God doesn't exist, which might technically be true; but in doing so they are hoping to distract from all the other outrageous claims religious scriptures made that can and have been proven to be false, such as world wide floods, talking animals, people rising from the dead, etc... And do keep in mind that the burden of proof falls upon the believer, not the skeptic.

The non-religious (an umbrella category which includes agnostics, atheists, and deists) is the fastest growing religious category among young people in the Western World. And is even on the rise in the Islamic world, where people can often face prison or even death sentences for apostasy.

Before I address your points, I would like to state that I am a former Muslim, that I can speak and read Arabic, and that I have heard these arguments hundreds of times.

I'd like to start with the claim of mathematic miracles, as it is the less common one within the Islamic community. First, I'd like to point that this claim is far from unique to Islam and the Quran, as many Christians make similar claims about the Bible regarding biblical numerology and what is known as the Bible Code. Please consider that, in either case, the makers of these claims cherry pick the mathematical facts, the verses they're allegedly found in, and the equations used to derived the desired values. This is known as the Texas Sharp Shooter Fallacy, and it relies on cherry picking the desired subset of data points while ignoring the rest of the data. This can be done with any sufficiently large text.

As for the much more popular claim that the Quran contains scientific knowledge that wasn't know at the time. This relies on a number of fallacies:

1- Makers of this claim often claim that the knowledge allegedly contained in the Quran was unknown in Mohammed's time, which is not true in all cases. For instance, they claim that the Quran was the first to reveal the shape of the Earth, despite the fact that the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes knew the shape of the Earth and was able to measure its circumference several centuries before Mohammed.

2- The Quran is written in an ancient Arabic dialect, and contains many words that are not used in modern Arabic and are not understood most modern Arabic speakers. This leaves much of the Quran subject to deceptive and/or biased interpretations. And the interpretations that the claims of scientific miracles rely on are not found in the Tafsirs (interpretations) of the early Musfasirs such as Altabari and Ibn-Kathir. Furthermore, if you are not an Arabic speaker then you have to rely completely on deceptive and/or biased translations of the Quran. For example, 23:13 says: "And then We made him (man) a "nutfa" in a safe place". The word "nutfa" is not used in modern Arabic and is not known to most modern Arabic speakers. On his television program, the Egyptian apologist Zaghlul Alnajar claimed that the word meant "fertilized egg", while many English versions translate the word as "sperm". But when looking up the actual meaning of the word, we find it simply means "a small quantity of water".

3- These claims are derived from selective interpretation of vague passages. 21:30: "the heavens and the earth were one form so we split them asunder". Apologists claim that this verse describes the Big Bang. But its extremely undescriptive and lacks any clarifying details, and does not even come close to any description of the Big Bang I've ever heard.

4- Many have responded to these claims, deconstructing and debunking them. You can find many such responses on YouTube. A group of Muslim apologists approached embryologist PZ Myers and presented to him the Quran passages that supposedly describe the stages of human embryo development, and after listening to the passage he responded that its not accurate at all. A clip of this incident can also be found on Youtube. Just do a search for "scientific miracles in the Quran debunked". There are many people out there who have done a much better job of debunking these claims than I'm capable of.

5- The Quran actually contains blatant scientific errors which cannot be ignored. Examples include 86: 5-7: "let man see from which he was created, created from flowing water that comes from between the spine and the ribs" and 18:86: "until he reached the setting place of the sun and he found it setting into a muddy spring". I think the blatant errors in these two verses should be obvious to anyone with even the most elementary scientific literacy. You might not be familiar with these passages, as cherry picking apologists tend to avoid them for obvious reasons.

Smooth talking charlatans are often skilled at making their claims sound convincing and attractive. My advice is that before you believe any argument you hear, first research counter arguments and alternate points of view. You will often find that many arguments that seem convincing at first glance don't actually hold water when deconstructed by experts.

And last but not least: there is one very important ruling in Islam that I believe anyone who's thinking about becoming a Muslim needs to be aware of, and that is the ruling on apostasy know as Had Al-Rida. The ruling is that any Muslim who leaves Islam should be killed, in accordance with Mohammed's command "He who changes his religion, kill him!" Basically, you better be damn sure you won't change your mind later, because its a one-way street.

Personally, the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the letters (B, A, R, N, T) was the name Barton. I take that as a sign that Allah's favorite Avenger is Hawkeye. Clearly an illiterate desert dweller never could've predicted the MCU 1400 years ago unless he was a prophet, right?!

But seriously, the Arabic word for proton is pronounced like "bro-tone". Can you find any "a" sound in that? Because I can't.

Playgroundlover.

If you want to know God, leave religion behind and ask God to meet with you where you are.
If you just want to ignore the possibility that there is a God, then just do what you want to do and try to enjoy life.
Either way enjoying life is a good plan! Who wants to be miserable?

Now here is me going all logical for you.

Lets suppose there is no God. Then if you think there is a God, all you have done is wasted time.

However if there IS a God then you risk eternity.

I know this decision is stressful as one can feel like the weight of eternity is on ones sholders. But it needn't be stressful. Just a simple prayer.

PRAY "GOD. IF YOU ARE REAL, MEET ME WHERE I AM, AND SHOW ME WHAT I NEED TO KNOW TO KNOW YOU". Now if God is real, then you don't have to do anything. Let God answer your prayer.

Now give it time and wait. If God is real he HAS heard you and He WILL show you. What have you got to loose?