What happened for me was that I couldn’t believe and I fell into a deep depression and couldn’t find a reason to keep going and I stumbled on Jonathan’s words and C.S. Lewis’ books and I went through all the arguments and saw all my misgivings had answers but I still didn’t feel like I believed but then I heard the advice “behave as if you believed and see what happens”, so I prayed and tried to kind of mantle a Christian if that makes sense, to walk as what I thought a Christian would and think and see and speak and act as I thought a Christian would, and now I believe. Not that it hasn’t been rough and I haven’t struggled with my faith in Christ but He has always helped me and led me back to trusting in Him.
This is wonderful. I had a very similar experience, also Jonathan and CS Lewis. When I read Lewis's Mere Christianity, everything clicked. I immediately read the book again.
I struggled greatly with doubts in college but still went to church and prayed and read my Bible. Even in times where I wasn't sure I could keep believing it all I did it all anyway. And over time my questions and doubts were resolved as I continued to expose myself to the lord through these different means. Your feelings don't always line up with what's true, you have to do it anyway until you actually "feel like" you believe. Choosing to believe doesn't require your feelings to cooperate.
I wish I could commiserate with you, plasmabat. You are a suffering sorry case of a human specimen. Now that you've discovered there is no point to your existence, you've fallen prey to a life-disaffirming belief system -- all that goddism and jc-ism. I should at least pity you. But, why waste any emotional energy on you?????
I'm going through this now. The despair and yearning as an atheist just kept getting worse and worse until it's almost unbearable. I started praying again and it's really helped but I'm still struggling. I'm trying to follow the path of having hope even if there isn't clear reason for it anyway. And it has helped. I hope it will become a bit less like tripping and stumbling through the dark as I go. Its nice to hear from others who have navigated this.
Nature is chaotic, not deliberate. “Interpreted” implies you’re deriving meaning instead of meaning being given to you. Nature doesn’t forgive. The moment you say that you just make Nature into your personal god
@@buglepong I agree that if we interpret nature’s luck as an offering of grace or a blessing, then it is forgiving. But this assumes we combine nature and god rather than god vs nature. if we place grace and blessings in the rhelm of god, with nature under this rhelm (my personal belief), then luck could be a forgiving and act as a blessing. if we separate the natural from the supernatural (ie god vs nature, which is cannon from Thomas Aquinas), then I’d disagree as luck is reduced to probability. Does that make sense?
Plenty of people have left the faith because they lived it. If christians would stop pretending this doesn't happen they'd realize that faking it until you make it is usually trash advice.
I came to faith in God one night but then I started questioning whether the event that produced this faith was just an illusion or delusion or something. I still didn't have faith. I kept receiving signs, thank God, which later solidified my faith but the signs did not really bring me to full faith. It was choosing to have faith that was the key because after a while, I became tired of not being able to believe and just did it - after that, everything changed and I came to true belief. If your heart desires God, lean into him, throwing your full weight into the Christian life and orient your actions toward God. After a while you'll see the connections everywhere and then you'll see Christ in all things and it will be impossible to deny his existence.
I understand that many Christians are frustrated by atheistic arrogance. As exciting as I find this conversation, for many I don't think it quite gets to the heart of the matter. Not every atheist is a nihilist who thinks they can go through the world in a purely "objective" way. When someone says “I don't believe in God”, it doesn't necessarily mean that the person triumphantly claims to believe in nothing at all. Many people would be much more likely to accept God as the highest purpose if it weren't for the fact that part of believing in God is that God looks back, so to speak. That what you believe in has a consciousness of its own - that can be hard to grasp. One must recognize that it is honorable for people to wrestle with faith even though it is not easy for them. If there are sincere, deep, grueling doubts in my heart, then it is a sign of honesty to address them.
Yes faith is not equal among people and it can be a gift sone people have as-well as requires careful fostering. Some people are just atheists because they have very weak faith. Not necessarily that they are on a conquest against God.
You noted "... atheistic arrogance." Such as???? Either an intellectual position is well-justified or not. Atheism is ESSENTIALLY nothing other than an absence of belief of the sort that the theist believes in. So, you -- who fails to see the arrogance in yourself that licenses you to call others arrogant -- have no clue as to what atheism is, and yet you dare to call it arrogant or at least call the atheists arrogant. You sob arrogant!!!!
@@thecrow4597 Absolutely. Many Christians who have grown up in Christian families must remember that Christianity is their mother tongue, so to speak. It is much harder to learn a language as an adult. It's the same if you only rediscover Christianity on your own when you are 20 or even older. The tendency to believe is even partly genetically predisposed, as twin experiments have shown. It also often seems to me that religious doubts are perceived much more benevolently or understandingly by people within the religion, while doubts from atheists and agonostics are quickly seen as shallow excuses. Of course, you can't expect to be convinced of something from the bottom of your heart every second of the rest of your life, but there has to be a basic conviction. I am surprised that Jonathan Pageau finds it so unbelievable when people recognize a lot of the wisdom and beauty in faith on the one hand and at the same time do not feel the spark of conviction that a dead person can rise again.
That first comment about non believers being liars was rough. I so desperately wanted to believe. When I lost my faith it was the most painful thing that ever happened to me. I do believe in God now, but it’s not the one from my childhood or even the one Jonathan believes in. I did have to stop believing to get where I am now.
I go back and forth every week with my belief. I want Jesus and everything He taught to be real so badly, but I always hit a roadblock. There is something preventing me from being 100% in and no matter what I do I cannot change it.
@@thomasjames24306 I guess the impression I get from the gospels is that hope and faith are more similar to one another than belief and faith are to each other. When i have trouble believing in Christ, i at least hope that it is true. I think its still faith.
For all those in the thread, i love you and understand you. This is what I have been praying recently: Have mercy on me. I hope you understand that I don't understand. I know you understand that I don't understand. This has been carrying me. I'm sure I'll find the next step after this, as I always do, or rather God will. Came back because i found a verse. Mark 9:24 says: "Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, ‘Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!’"
Thank you! I was afraid I was the only person who would feel that way. I got real Dawkins vibes there. Believers need to walk the high road, and that's not what we saw there.
I find it so distracting when they leave autofocus on for interviews where you don't ever need to switch focus but in this instance it really was so beautiful
@jorgejungl exactly. They think the God of the universe is somehow Yahweh. A tribal storm and blood sacrifice god. One out of many in the Hebrew pantheon.
I was baptized Catholic after undergoing years of indoctrination as a Protestant in my childhood I never agreed with the Protestant denomination (Pentecostal) the denomination which I grew up with, I always questioned since my dad also disagreed with it and he, told me to question it, so I became a sola scriptura adherent at an early age but the relativism within that led me to fall away to the the neo-paganism of todays world, I lived a pagan life mostly but always read the Bible and tried researching as much as I could, I read about church history the reformation, Catholicism, early church fathers, Eastern Orthodoxy and I was opposed to anything Catholic or orthodox due to bad Protestant arguments, I was at a crossroads after reading a particular early church history book and realized I could not adhere to sola scriptura and the protestant tradition, so I renounced it and the crossroads was choosing between Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism I eventually chose Catholicism and became Catholic after going to RCIA, I kept going I tried reading Catholic books, tried rosaries, worked out, tried abstaining from vices, I prayed and won over gluttony and lust for a very long time and was very motivated, but every time I went to mass I felt empty as if it was pointless to go I didn’t feel like my life was going anywhere and I fell away to alcohol, as in my past I used to be an alcoholic in my pagan past, it’s like I went back and confessed to the priest but fell away again and I have lost hope in God, I have read philosophy and understand the transcendental argument and completely believe Jesus existed as historical evidence shows but sometimes I become engulfed in the belief in the Gnostic belief, but I know that’s heretical and a lie but it’s as if it keeps tempting me to believe God is not good, I struggle with philosophical and theological questions and I just can’t follow God right now, I know Church isn’t about emotion about a feeling but I don’t see my life improving in any aspect and I feel like God isn’t there, idk what to do anymore I’ve tired praying everyone prays for me always but it’s as if I keep returning to my pagan ways, idk does anyone have my advice? One thing I do understand is what Augustine is “our hearts are restless until they rest in you” but even when I try to follow God nothing happens, so I fall away easily, can anyone guide me?
It is true, everyone lives by faith. We are born trusting in our parents and as we begin to talk we are constantly growing due to our trust in our parents or lack of. But the object of one's faith determines their outcome. Many people in the bible believed they couldn't do what God asked them. (Moses, Gideon, Sarah Abraham's wife) Many people believe they can't do certain daily tasks. How do people overcome these obstacles? Faith.
There's a big difference between faith and confidence. Faith is belief without evidence, and can eventually turn out to be wrong. Confidence is the knowledge that you are making gains based on demonstrated past success. You know what works and what doesn't work. Of course, life holds no guarantees, but you can measure your progress and guide yourself based on experience. People can overcome obstacles with knowledge based confidence. There's no need for faith in the divine.
@BenChokin You know that confidence can come from faith in the divine right? Both faith and confidence are more closely related and intertwined together than you think.
@ For clarity, I'm going to assume you're talking about biblical faith, which is not a path to truth. Your truth is based on your faith, others' truths are based on their faiths. That's not how you gain confidence in what true, as has been demonstrated over thousands of years. And to my complete dismay, is STILL being demonstrated and ignored to this very day.
@BenChokin I'm not cause I'm not a Christian. Lol. Also there is no such thing as a path to truth for TRUTH in general does not exist. The paradox of existence or the only proper truth is that there is no such thing as truth at all.
You’ve got to take these people more seriously when they say they don’t think God is real. What this really means, for many, is “ I am committed to what I understand the truth to be. And I don’t see how I could collect evidence of this claim.” I think the right answer is to tell them that the thing that they call reality -that’s what you call God. And the true difference isn’t really about factual beliefs, it’s that you’ve cultivated intentional relationship with reality: one of trust and gratitude. Praying when you don’t believe in God is just conducting an experiment . That’s how they should see it. Pray, pretend it’s real, and see what happens. That’s the scientific method. It’s the spiritual path as well. You can’t collect evidence of a hypothesis that you’re not willing to experiment on. And the experiment is as simple as pretending it’s real, and seeing how acting that way changes your life. If your life goes better because you find yourself acting better, well, that’s evidence that there’s something to it.
I'm an atheist. I'll respond to this part: "I think the right answer is to tell them that the thing that they call reality -that’s what you call God". What firsts pops into my head is, when I look at reality, I don't see something that's all good and all loving at all. I won't list all of the horrible things that go on but I feel you can get my drift. 99.9% of the universe is so unfitting for human life that it would obliterate the body within seconds. How is that all loving and all good? Actually, the Bible itself has verse after verse about how the "world" is so wicked and that one shouldn't be "of" it. The world is essentially our reality. Reality is so cruel that, in order to survive, a species must maim, steal and kill. If reality is equal to God, reality seems to be cruel and cold to the utmost degree.
@@Mr_M1dnight @Mr_M1dnight I mean to your first point about the emptiness and lethality of space, that should have no bearing on how loving reality is. What if we're not meant to go into space - it's like a toddler crying because they're not allowed to go past the baby fence to where the stairs are. It's not like reality is forcing us to go to space or other planets. The world clearly has a lot of pain and suffering in it, no doubt. But it also has good things in it - not only that, the good things seem to be designed to overpower the bad things. Sure, some people are depressed: but this is recognised as an abnormality or a disorder. Most people believe that life is worth it, and most people throughout history have believed that it's worth it and that bringing children into it is worth it. To survive, members of some species have to kill members of other species, this is true - but I don't buy the claim that this is immoral. It's not immoral for me to kill a chicken, nor is death such a catastrophe that its presence in the universe makes it evil. Death is a part of life, in many ways it is what makes life precious in the first place. As for pain and suffering as apart from death, it seems that you can't have death without them, in a sense. They're mechanisms to make us avoid death because life is precious. If we didn't have pain, it would be because life isn't precious, and that would be a much worse universe than the one we have.
@@Mr_M1dnight yes, it would be more accurate to say "the thing you call 'goodness' is what I call God". The way God manifests is in things being properly ordered. To the extent anything is not good, it is disordered and not oriented toward God, and is moving toward nonexistence. Darkness doesn't exist, it's the absence of light. The vacuum of space doesn't exist, it's the absence of matter. That nonexistence will kill you if you throw yourself into it; the same has long been said of the sea. (Of course the sea is made of matter, but it's formless chaos; no order oriented toward life.) So, when a person is cruel to others, that's a person acting out values out of order. That disorder if allowed to spread more disorder will eventually bring that person death. People who behave this way become mentally disordered, and perhaps eventually lose the ability to repent of their actions. Of course they might also end up physically dead in one way or another as a result of their behavior.
william james says this in his varieties of religious experience. the mystical realm, or whatever you like to call it, has concrete real world effects on us as people- therefore it is not irreal.
“Catholic” Ireland is one of the hardest western countries in which to have faith. Growing up there in catholic schools was like doing a PhD in practical atheism. The fruits of which we can see today in a country intoxicated by liberalism. Lucky for me I left a long time ago and eventually found Orthodoxy and came home (to Christ ….. most unworthily).
Gotta be honest, this was the attitude that made me an atheist back in the 90's. There's a certain pride to Christocentrism and Defaultism that still hasn't sat right to me in the 30 years since, despite my return to theism. I may never have become an atheist if my questioning were better met by options of exploration instead of "just believe" and (more implicit in the video) "Christianity is the only option even worth considering". And hot-take... It's a shame that the video opened by accused a _very real demographic of people who want to believe in God_ of being bad-faith and lying. You know, we've **all** been burned a little by New Atheists, but maybe let's not lower ourselves to their level.
You can't "choose" to believe. Belief isn't a matter of choice, it's a matter of *experience.* What we believe is that which we hold true to a sufficient degree that we will act on it. That's not something you can choose. Think it's something you can choose? Then choose to believe that gravity doesn't affect you and walk off the top of a tall building. You won't do it. You won't do it because *you don't and can't actually believe it.* If belief were something we could simply choose then the above exercise would be a trivial one to undertake. But only the most insane would actually go through with it. Only the most insane can truly *choose* to believe things. And so we're left with the things that cause our beliefs in the first place: experience and thought. Thought, because you can work out something in your own mind enough to come to believe it, but *you have to believe that which underpins it first.* And experience, because experiencing something is the direct means by which we learn about the world. This is why belief in God is a matter of faith in the end. I define faith as belief in that which you cannot, even in principle, demonstrate to others. The belief comes about through some sort of experience. The above is why evangelical Christians are utterly wrong in their claim that we can just "choose to believe". We can't.
Your argument is based on the false assumption that "belief" in God is the same concept or category as belief in gravity and so on. The holy Fathers understand "belief" in God much differently, that is, as a virtue that has to be trained and cultivated like e.g. patient endurance, mercy, meekness and so on. There is a movement of the will towards enacting the virtue and then of course it is reinforced through feedback from reality which you expressed as experience. But you are not passive with regards to belief, you choose to act a certain way and then you experience reality accordingly and that nourishes belief, that is cultivating the virtues.
@@user-tp7wi4lt2b "Your argument is based on the false assumption that "belief" in God is the same concept or category as belief in gravity and so on. The holy Fathers understand "belief" in God much differently, that is, as a virtue that has to be trained and cultivated like e.g. patient endurance, mercy, meekness and so on." References to that would be *most* welcome. In any case, if what you say is true then "belief" is the wrong term for us to be using for this, because that which can be trained is not belief in the commonly understood sense of the word but is instead either capability, skill, or characteristic. I'm very, *very* reluctant to use a word to mean something other than its widely understood meaning, except where heightened precision demands it (as is the case with "faith"). "Belief", like any other word, has a widely understood meaning that matches the use to which I'm putting it but which does *not* match the apparent use to which the Church Fathers are putting it. The problem with redefining terms like that is that it makes it possible to *mislead,* by using a term to mean one thing when it is understood to mean something else. I do not accuse you or the Church Fathers of that, but it's something to be very cautious about, as it is a technique that the radical left uses in order to advance its agenda (see, e.g. how they use the term "racist"). If it is truth that we pursue, then we must be as clear in our meaning as possible, and that demands the use of the most widely understood meaning of the terms we choose, and if we insist on using some other meaning for a term then we must state that alternate meaning up-front so that all understand what we mean by what we say. Finally, how does one *train* to believe in God? More precisely, how does one acquire the *initial belief* through training? I know of no means by which to achieve that. My belief in God came upon me as a result of experience, as a result of what I saw. It was a *realization,* not something that I acquired through training. So given the above, *exactly* what do you mean when you say to someone that you believe in God? It clearly cannot mean that you hold the existence of God to be true, or that you hold various characteristics of God to be true. For it to be something that is trained or cultivated, it cannot be something you hold true, it has to be something else, because *what you hold true is not something you can choose but is instead the result of experience.*
I would love to hear you do a detailed, not necessarily long, breakdown of neoplatonic metaphyiscs and how it interfaces with this understanding of symbolism and attention. Basically what happens when, instead of Love, you put Unity as the highest good. What are the strengths and weaknesses of that.
I was an atheist that didn't want to believe in God. Then God came in and metaphorically broke my teeth in to get my attention. I believe in God now. Every kneel will bow, either by crook or by hook 😂.
I gave God an inch and He took a mile. 😊 Seriously though, ive been a Christian 15 years now. And it true, you just need faith as small as a mustard seed to get started.
The problem is people like myself have done those things but still come back empty handed. It ls those who want to belive and want it to be true but no evidence that creates deep heart breka. If life works out for you, relatively well then Yes believing is easier. Just doesn't make it true
Then the problem isn't wanting faith, the problem is expecting fruit to be produced immediately. Before a tree sprouts and produces fruit, it seed must be planted in the ground and die, so it can give way to life. Likewise in the life of living by faith, you need to let your desire for immediate results die, then you'll see the fruits of it grow. It's a paradox, but this was a hurdle I overcame when I was in your shoes. It takes time. More specifically, I'd encourage you to find a local Orthodox Church and participate in the community and get to know the priest, talk to him!
Don't give up! Life doesn't work out for Christians; you should not think that you have come back empty-handed because life did not work out for you. True Christianity is about suffering for Christ, denying oneself for Christ, and always getting up, knowing our home is not of this world, it is too imperfect for that. Those who expect a good life from Christianity hope in vain and will fall. You should expect to be cursed out, spit upon, suffer, and finally to be crucified. If you choose to put your faith in him, you will come to see the connections and see Christ everywhere, even in the depths of your suffering. There will be nothing you will look at and not see him in that thing. If there is something I would die for it would be this, because I have experienced it after struggling to put my faith in him despite the sea of evidence before my eyes - and there is more evidence you realize. But all of this is only possible if you pray and read scripture daily and make spiritual progress even if that means falling and never ceasing to get back up, for "those who endure until the end will be saved". Whenever your mind is not occupied with anything in particular, say "LORD JESUS CHRIST, HAVE MERCY ON ME, A SINNER!" and make the sign of the cross whenever you are tempted. Say the Our Father multiple times a day. Always give thanks to God before and after meals, even if just mentally. Pray in the morning and at night. And perhaps most important of all, follow your conscience, always, for those who for some reason could not believe in Christ, whether because they lived before the incarnation or for other reasons will be judged based on following their conscience, because your conscience belongs to the nous, your spiritual organ with which you perceive the still small voice of God within. Realize that this world with all of its imperfections is not your home. You long for God because he has planted the memory of paradise in your heart and you have nostalgia for it. P.S.: I recommend finding an Eastern Orthodox Church nearby, attending it every Sunday, and talking to the priest! God bless you!
I have come to see the capacity for faith to be a developmental process. There has to be milestones to accomplish before higher stages of growth can occur, not always in a neat linear manner. Disorder, disease, disfigurement, regression, abuse, etc can all disrupt this process. So if you can't find your self to come to faith, but want it, you may still be activating that neuronal activity that corresponds to spiritual communication, so then it takes grace to finish healing you and you may need to develop some baseline beliefs before you can come to faith. If that activity is occuring, you may be in closer proximity to God than you think or feel. That activity may not be an indicator of salvation since faith comes by hearing/receiving and transforms by witnessing/confessing. Especially so if you've received the indelible mark on your soul that us baptism. Think of faith as an assent to the spiritual and the beginning of communion with God. And that faith also goes through a developmental process. I know it sounds kind of woo'ish, but I am taking the apophatic spiritual doctrine that goes back to the teachings of the Early Christian Fathers, especially reformulated with a Thomistic background in the teaching of St. John of the Cross's dark night of the soul.
@@olubunmiolumuyiwado you people even try to listen to an atheists perspective, or just jump straight to the gaslighting, telling them how they'redoing it wrong? He said nothing about expecting immediate feedback. He didn't even say he was done searching. Is it so unfathomable to you that people's minds work differently and what works for you may not work for others?
@@amaizenblue44 God as the source of reality isn't about "people’s minds working differently" but about misunderstanding Orthodox Christianity or expecting God to work on your timing; pride or impatience. Reality follows patterns, with God as its source. Matthieu Pageau discusses this in "The Language of Creation". Unless you're a solipsist, you recognize reality exists and follows divine patterns with different forms: Soul + Body, Husband + Wife, Leader + Follower, etc. Struggling with faith often comes from blindness to these patterns or pride in thinking you're above them. Christ warns about this when speaking of "the eye as the lamp of the body." That's why I advised taking it slow-engage in Orthodox worship, talk to a priest, and participate in divine patterns to see how they lead to Christ, the God-man, revealing the path/pattern to eternal life.
The way we come to believe things to have an identity is to draw a boundary around different patterns which seem to work together towards the same purpose, but the patterns are finite and scientific proof requires measurable evidence. It doesn’t work well for infinite patterns and by nature, for transcendent beings, nothing will work because by virtue of existing you’re already too limited to “see” the wholeness of God
Yup you've got it, science measures finite patterns that are measurable by human standards. But what about patterns that are beyond measurable, or only partially discernable? This is what the ancients were correctly and intuitively able to grasp about reality. If there are patterns that measure us, we ought to know how to live according to the right patterns lest we are led astray and perish.
Why am I so sad and disappointed to see Johnathan smoking? That was a shock. I’m glad to see that he is enjoying himself and letting loose a little. But wow. Surreal.
I was a little surprised too, but I don't think it is much of a problem. From my own experience I can tell you that smoking a cigar is way different than smoking a cigarette. The cigarette is about the nicotine, but the cigar is all about the taste (which is why you don't inhale it into your lungs). Cigars actually taste and smell pretty good, similar to vanilla, while cigarette smoke just kinda stinks. Personally, I think that it is not a problem to have a little treat like a cigar or a good wine when in good company, as long as it doesn't become a habit. I'm not saying that you suggested otherwise, I just thought that it was worth mentioning.
I can’t explain faith easily, but it works for me.. maybe I’m unique. I chose to believe aspects of Christianity, and from that have received dreams, pictures, and so forth of things I would have no way of knowing, but ended up being true, which directly resolved problems and changed my circumstances when I followed through. Many people want God to fit in a box that aligns with how they see the world and how they think it should be.. and reject Christianity when it doesn’t fit with their boundaries of what they think God should do. 🤷♂️
I loved this part of the discussion so much. But something I wonder about as someone who wants to believe but struggles to - are we allowed to say the nicene creed? I feel like its somewhat disingenuous to say the creed if you're not sure if you really believe it, even if you want to live as a Christian?
If you really genuinely wanted to believe with all your heart, I would see nothing wrong with saying the creed. It is very admirable that you want to be careful with what you choose to say but in a liturgical context as someone wanting to believe, it feels completely appropriate to pronounce those words with a spirit of “Lord I want to believe help me to trust these words.” God bless you!
I remember being 11, and never ever getting it. I was what some call a "Fire insurance clent" up until the age of about 16. I argued at age 11, that people either got, or didn't get what I called a mental "God circuit." When I tried to explain to those above me that "I just can't get it" I was either seen as impossible or just told to pray even harder. It was absolutely useless to me. The "Help my unbelief" prayers were like saying something into a void and expecting something to show up. I did what I called "The boring God stuff" as a kid waiting for the "SAVED!" moment that's supposed to happen. It never did. I like Paul Vanderklay for not dismissing such concepts as absurdities or excuses. In some of his videos he talked to such people and treated them as genuine. I later called it "Inability to switch ones mind into genuine belief in God mode." Some people may hate the concept I called the "God circuit." Some may hate the "Switch that actives belief in God mode." Some may complain about such concepts as mechanical thinking. Problem is, that is often the nature of aspies. They cannot make their minds think in mysterious spiritual ways. I probably hated the reddit atheism movement because I saw them as absolutists, chasing the false idols of active antiracism and other PC, SJW, and woke movements. 2:38 Yes, I was stuck with the Southern Baptist Convention as a kid, and was stuck with hellfire and brimstone sermon paranoia. Pascal's Wager combined with paranoia. Nobody ever said anything of Pascal's Wager back then. I discovered it online when ranting about how much I hated the way I was seen when I was younger. 5:34 It makes me think of a high priority in my life that I cannot adequately explain. It is the burning desire I have had for a trip to Japan. I was 5 and got it in the year 1989. Around age 7, I had reached this absurd conclusion that it was made by Nissan and Nintendo. However, I later realized in my teens that it couldn't have been a reason, I knew other kids with the same influences and never got the desire. I thought maybe it was all those photos of Tokyo at night and being told it's 10 years in the future. If you have seen those pictures, odds are at least one included Shibuya Crossing. I then concluded that futuristic neon lights couldn't be an explanation, I had seen Times Square NYC in 1994 and the Las Vegas Strip in 1995. I went through other ideas and concluded I may never outsmart my own desire. Hearing Joker's "If I have to have an origin story, I prefer it to be multiple choice" may not have actually been an answer for me, but it did make my feelings a little more tolerable.
"What do you say when people tell you they don't believe in God?" "Pfft, yeah right! I don't care." "Have you considered being a hypocrite?" I'm gobsmacked, almost speechless.
I get what you mean. Not for those who are truly unsure, but for people who take some pride in being a "skeptic" and not being swayed by any amount of evidence, history, reason, etc. They have faith in their decision not to accept it.
It doesn't have to be. There are atheists who actively believe there are no gods. And there are atheists who simply haven't been convinced either way. You can call the second group agnostic if you want, but it doesn't get anywhere in conversation because of how THEY define atheism. It doesn't do any good to argue about definitions. Just get on the same page and go from there. A majority of atheists you talk to on UA-cam, especially these days, don't see atheism and agnosticism as two different hierarchies of belief, but that on speaks of belief (atheism) and one speaks of knowledge (agnosticism). It is not traditional in philosophical discussions to define it that way, but neither is it a new concept. It's been around for 100+ years, and has just gained a bit of ground the last couple decades.
That's what RC Sproul said, too. If you don't believe there's a God, it's not an intellectual problem, it's a moral problem: you don't like the God you know exists. Really, that's just a summary of the last half of Romans 1.
It's comforting in a weird sense to know that even the Israelites in the desert with Moses who saw God for themselves couldn't believe (which is insane because they believed in anything including child sacrifice) and Jesus saying blessed are those who haven't seen yet believed, implying he knew how hard it is to believe. Heck most of the old testament is just trying to get the Israelites to believe
I don't understand why no one addresses _the main_ response to Pascal's wager here: that belief isn't something that you get to choose. If one knows something is false, one _cannot_ then choose to believe in its truth. If one has cause for doubt and cause for affirmation, then one cannot excise any of these causes, so then their belief remains suspended. Belief is deterministic like this. I know Pageau and Peterson cite James to rebuff this, but I'd strongly encourage them to familiarise themselves with Pierce's utter demolition of James on this point, to such a point that he stopped writing on philosophy. The choice of belief introduces just too many problems. Otherwise, I am an atheist. I would very much like to believe in the god of the bible; it would be better if they were real than not in my opinion. The central issue for me is the incoherence of the Aquinus-ian properties ascribed to god (omni-x), but the necessity of that god to need those properties. God is _not_ synonymous with value hierarchies; god is metaphysical - he causes the value hierarchies, as he causes the natural world, but he isn't identified with them. I think there is a unity between the moral and natural world - I consider it the central appeal to the monotheistic worldview - but I don't think that god is _necessary_ for that unity.
Ive never understood the position of "wanting to believe but not being able to." People don't believe in things because they have proof. People believe in things because they want to. Justifiying belief is very hard and requires a level of honesty and critical thinking most people have no access to.
The way I think of it is ants can never see and know mountains because they’re too small. We can see mountains because we’re greater than ants. But God is that for which everything is an ant and He is the mountain.
like peterson tries to say, its not about what you declare but how you live. there's about 10 layers of atheism between thinking there may be a god to believing he is your personal saviour or whatever
Why is it so hard to believe there are atheists who think the idea of a blissful afterlife (or a loving creator, a faithful confidant, etc.)sounds great...but just cant believe its true?
Not a huge fan of the "bro" format, with cigars, book shelves, black shirts and wood paneling. That being said, I wish it went on less tangents. Scratching too many surfaces, not enough digging, despite a few nuggets from Pageau.
5:12 the problem with this take is faith in these things actualize and become a reality at some point. With faith in God, there seems to be no end in sight that ever comes about. It never turns into anything like having faith that you’ll get married or have kids. Faith in God is entirely dependent on what comes after death, which means there is no way for it to materialize during our lives.
Look at the Saints in Orthodox Christianity, like St. Paisios, St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia, St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco etc. These are the realization and real tangible end of faith in one's life, that is, the transformation and deification of the whole human being.
When people say they want to believe in God but can’t they are expressing that the worldview they grew up in conditioned them to scrutinize their own intuition and they can’t get rid of that programming. It’s a tough spot to be in because your entire way of thinking was molded to kill your spiritual and intuitive faculties in the west.
I've been saying this for years. But now Jonathan says it and everyone listens? Why!? Just because he says it calmly while I rant about it like a crazy person? Grow up.
Rhetoric is very important when communicating. It's what differenciates something from "Good" to "Very Good". St Paul says that it's important to salt your words with Love. Salt brings out flavour in food and preserves it quality and freshness. Likewise, if you focus on seasoning your words with Love, you will sow the words deep into a persons heart and also preserve it there for a very long time. Take the extra time to do that, and on what Saint Paul taught I promise you that you'll see changes in your interaction with people you know in real life.
Is everyone listening? I felt this response was pretty weak and closed-minded. If he can't understand what this people are saying then maybe he isn't as wise as he thinks he is.
Unbelievable. I am one of the people youre talking about. I cant believe but I want to, and your response is to call me a liar? Thats absolutely out of touch. Possibly insane. Definitely insensitive. And yes, ive tried cognitive disaonance, going to church, prayer, reading the bible. It doesnt work when you see its not real.
Guys, if something doesn't make sense, take that as a sign that it's likely a bunch of nonsense. You don't need religion but what it may offer you -- community, purpose, rituals, a connection to the past, a trajectory for the future, and so on.
why would you want to just believe the physical reality is all that exists? Everything around you is decaying. Nothing that you see, hear or feel will lasts forever. If you truly embraced that perspective to it's fullest your whole existence becomes nihilistic. Why go to the bathroom when you need to pee? might as well just piss your pants, everything is wasting away to nothingness anyway. People might think youre weird, who cares, their thoughts and opinions will die with them. Live this way for 1 week and I bet youll be wishing something beyond the physical realm exists. That realm is where God exists, where true life exists.
@@ninjason57 Nihilism isn't actually as bad as it is presented or seems. Exaggerations and misunderstanding however unfortunately end up giving it a bad rep.
@ Go live your life as if it has no inherent meaning, purpose, or value. Live without any sense of moral truth. Go fulfill every desire that pops into your mind despite the consequences. If you still believe it's not as bad as it seems then you're lying to yourself.
What happened for me was that I couldn’t believe and I fell into a deep depression and couldn’t find a reason to keep going and I stumbled on Jonathan’s words and C.S. Lewis’ books and I went through all the arguments and saw all my misgivings had answers but I still didn’t feel like I believed but then I heard the advice “behave as if you believed and see what happens”, so I prayed and tried to kind of mantle a Christian if that makes sense, to walk as what I thought a Christian would and think and see and speak and act as I thought a Christian would, and now I believe.
Not that it hasn’t been rough and I haven’t struggled with my faith in Christ but He has always helped me and led me back to trusting in Him.
This is wonderful. I had a very similar experience, also Jonathan and CS Lewis. When I read Lewis's Mere Christianity, everything clicked. I immediately read the book again.
I struggled greatly with doubts in college but still went to church and prayed and read my Bible. Even in times where I wasn't sure I could keep believing it all I did it all anyway. And over time my questions and doubts were resolved as I continued to expose myself to the lord through these different means. Your feelings don't always line up with what's true, you have to do it anyway until you actually "feel like" you believe. Choosing to believe doesn't require your feelings to cooperate.
Who has faith without first having doubt? A lot of us have been there, brother.
I wish I could commiserate with you, plasmabat. You are a suffering sorry case of a human specimen. Now that you've discovered there is no point to your existence, you've fallen prey to a life-disaffirming belief system -- all that goddism and jc-ism. I should at least pity you. But, why waste any emotional energy on you?????
I'm going through this now. The despair and yearning as an atheist just kept getting worse and worse until it's almost unbearable. I started praying again and it's really helped but I'm still struggling. I'm trying to follow the path of having hope even if there isn't clear reason for it anyway. And it has helped. I hope it will become a bit less like tripping and stumbling through the dark as I go. Its nice to hear from others who have navigated this.
“God forgives, nature doesn’t” is one of the hardest hitting lines I’ve ever heard.
nature forgives all the time. its called luck.
@buglepong if we define luck as random chance, then how is that forgiving? Games of luck like poker and gambling are not forgiving.
@@andrewgibson5381 they can be if so interpreted
Nature is chaotic, not deliberate. “Interpreted” implies you’re deriving meaning instead of meaning being given to you. Nature doesn’t forgive. The moment you say that you just make Nature into your personal god
@@buglepong I agree that if we interpret nature’s luck as an offering of grace or a blessing, then it is forgiving. But this assumes we combine nature and god rather than god vs nature.
if we place grace and blessings in the rhelm of god, with nature under this rhelm (my personal belief), then luck could be a forgiving and act as a blessing.
if we separate the natural from the supernatural (ie god vs nature, which is cannon from Thomas Aquinas), then I’d disagree as luck is reduced to probability.
Does that make sense?
You cannot think your way into a new way of living.
You have to live your way into a new way of thinking
Plenty of people have left the faith because they lived it. If christians would stop pretending this doesn't happen they'd realize that faking it until you make it is usually trash advice.
I came to faith in God one night but then I started questioning whether the event that produced this faith was just an illusion or delusion or something. I still didn't have faith. I kept receiving signs, thank God, which later solidified my faith but the signs did not really bring me to full faith. It was choosing to have faith that was the key because after a while, I became tired of not being able to believe and just did it - after that, everything changed and I came to true belief. If your heart desires God, lean into him, throwing your full weight into the Christian life and orient your actions toward God. After a while you'll see the connections everywhere and then you'll see Christ in all things and it will be impossible to deny his existence.
I understand that many Christians are frustrated by atheistic arrogance. As exciting as I find this conversation, for many I don't think it quite gets to the heart of the matter. Not every atheist is a nihilist who thinks they can go through the world in a purely "objective" way. When someone says “I don't believe in God”, it doesn't necessarily mean that the person triumphantly claims to believe in nothing at all. Many people would be much more likely to accept God as the highest purpose if it weren't for the fact that part of believing in God is that God looks back, so to speak. That what you believe in has a consciousness of its own - that can be hard to grasp. One must recognize that it is honorable for people to wrestle with faith even though it is not easy for them. If there are sincere, deep, grueling doubts in my heart, then it is a sign of honesty to address them.
Yes faith is not equal among people and it can be a gift sone people have as-well as requires careful fostering. Some people are just atheists because they have very weak faith. Not necessarily that they are on a conquest against God.
Yes thank you for sharing. Many religious people claim to have a “relationship” with god. That is difficult for many of us
You noted "... atheistic arrogance." Such as????
Either an intellectual position is well-justified or not. Atheism is ESSENTIALLY nothing other than an absence of belief of the sort that the theist believes in. So, you -- who fails to see the arrogance in yourself that licenses you to call others arrogant -- have no clue as to what atheism is, and yet you dare to call it arrogant or at least call the atheists arrogant. You sob arrogant!!!!
@@thecrow4597 Absolutely. Many Christians who have grown up in Christian families must remember that Christianity is their mother tongue, so to speak. It is much harder to learn a language as an adult. It's the same if you only rediscover Christianity on your own when you are 20 or even older. The tendency to believe is even partly genetically predisposed, as twin experiments have shown. It also often seems to me that religious doubts are perceived much more benevolently or understandingly by people within the religion, while doubts from atheists and agonostics are quickly seen as shallow excuses. Of course, you can't expect to be convinced of something from the bottom of your heart every second of the rest of your life, but there has to be a basic conviction. I am surprised that Jonathan Pageau finds it so unbelievable when people recognize a lot of the wisdom and beauty in faith on the one hand and at the same time do not feel the spark of conviction that a dead person can rise again.
That first comment about non believers being liars was rough. I so desperately wanted to believe. When I lost my faith it was the most painful thing that ever happened to me.
I do believe in God now, but it’s not the one from my childhood or even the one Jonathan believes in. I did have to stop believing to get where I am now.
I agree. saying non-believers must all be liars, i think is an internalized lie. I believe in God but i believe people genuinely don't believe in God.
I go back and forth every week with my belief. I want Jesus and everything He taught to be real so badly, but I always hit a roadblock. There is something preventing me from being 100% in and no matter what I do I cannot change it.
@@thomasjames24306 I guess the impression I get from the gospels is that hope and faith are more similar to one another than belief and faith are to each other. When i have trouble believing in Christ, i at least hope that it is true. I think its still faith.
For all those in the thread, i love you and understand you. This is what I have been praying recently: Have mercy on me. I hope you understand that I don't understand. I know you understand that I don't understand.
This has been carrying me. I'm sure I'll find the next step after this, as I always do, or rather God will.
Came back because i found a verse. Mark 9:24 says:
"Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, ‘Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!’"
Thank you! I was afraid I was the only person who would feel that way. I got real Dawkins vibes there. Believers need to walk the high road, and that's not what we saw there.
The camera focus switch in 3:58 is just so poetic
Exactly lol that's the most symbolism happens moment I have seen haha it synchronized exactly with what he meant too.
I find it so distracting when they leave autofocus on for interviews where you don't ever need to switch focus but in this instance it really was so beautiful
Doubt God but believe doubts? Why not doubt doubts and believe God?
Amen.
This is the way
Which god?
@jorgejungl exactly. They think the God of the universe is somehow Yahweh. A tribal storm and blood sacrifice god. One out of many in the Hebrew pantheon.
Because it's a cultural fairy tale. Like all the other world religions and myths. Duh.
I was baptized Catholic after undergoing years of indoctrination as a Protestant in my childhood I never agreed with the Protestant denomination (Pentecostal) the denomination which I grew up with, I always questioned since my dad also disagreed with it and he, told me to question it, so I became a sola scriptura adherent at an early age but the relativism within that led me to fall away to the the neo-paganism of todays world, I lived a pagan life mostly but always read the Bible and tried researching as much as I could, I read about church history the reformation, Catholicism, early church fathers, Eastern Orthodoxy and I was opposed to anything Catholic or orthodox due to bad Protestant arguments, I was at a crossroads after reading a particular early church history book and realized I could not adhere to sola scriptura and the protestant tradition, so I renounced it and the crossroads was choosing between Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism I eventually chose Catholicism and became Catholic after going to RCIA, I kept going I tried reading Catholic books, tried rosaries, worked out, tried abstaining from vices, I prayed and won over gluttony and lust for a very long time and was very motivated, but every time I went to mass I felt empty as if it was pointless to go I didn’t feel like my life was going anywhere and I fell away to alcohol, as in my past I used to be an alcoholic in my pagan past, it’s like I went back and confessed to the priest but fell away again and I have lost hope in God, I have read philosophy and understand the transcendental argument and completely believe Jesus existed as historical evidence shows but sometimes I become engulfed in the belief in the Gnostic belief, but I know that’s heretical and a lie but it’s as if it keeps tempting me to believe God is not good, I struggle with philosophical and theological questions and I just can’t follow God right now, I know Church isn’t about emotion about a feeling but I don’t see my life improving in any aspect and I feel like God isn’t there, idk what to do anymore I’ve tired praying everyone prays for me always but it’s as if I keep returning to my pagan ways, idk does anyone have my advice? One thing I do understand is what Augustine is “our hearts are restless until they rest in you” but even when I try to follow God nothing happens, so I fall away easily, can anyone guide me?
Maybe just relax. Have some time to think and don’t panic as though things need to happen right now. Understand yourself
It is true, everyone lives by faith. We are born trusting in our parents and as we begin to talk we are constantly growing due to our trust in our parents or lack of. But the object of one's faith determines their outcome. Many people in the bible believed they couldn't do what God asked them. (Moses, Gideon, Sarah Abraham's wife) Many people believe they can't do certain daily tasks. How do people overcome these obstacles? Faith.
@@kaenwanderer4547 Well said.
There's a big difference between faith and confidence. Faith is belief without evidence, and can eventually turn out to be wrong. Confidence is the knowledge that you are making gains based on demonstrated past success. You know what works and what doesn't work. Of course, life holds no guarantees, but you can measure your progress and guide yourself based on experience.
People can overcome obstacles with knowledge based confidence. There's no need for faith in the divine.
@BenChokin You know that confidence can come from faith in the divine right? Both faith and confidence are more closely related and intertwined together than you think.
@ For clarity, I'm going to assume you're talking about biblical faith, which is not a path to truth. Your truth is based on your faith, others' truths are based on their faiths.
That's not how you gain confidence in what true, as has been demonstrated over thousands of years.
And to my complete dismay, is STILL being demonstrated and ignored to this very day.
@BenChokin I'm not cause I'm not a Christian. Lol. Also there is no such thing as a path to truth for TRUTH in general does not exist. The paradox of existence or the only proper truth is that there is no such thing as truth at all.
You’ve got to take these people more seriously when they say they don’t think God is real. What this really means, for many, is “ I am committed to what I understand the truth to be. And I don’t see how I could collect evidence of this claim.”
I think the right answer is to tell them that the thing that they call reality -that’s what you call God. And the true difference isn’t really about factual beliefs, it’s that you’ve cultivated intentional relationship with reality: one of trust and gratitude.
Praying when you don’t believe in God is just conducting an experiment . That’s how they should see it. Pray, pretend it’s real, and see what happens. That’s the scientific method. It’s the spiritual path as well. You can’t collect evidence of a hypothesis that you’re not willing to experiment on. And the experiment is as simple as pretending it’s real, and seeing how acting that way changes your life. If your life goes better because you find yourself acting better, well, that’s evidence that there’s something to it.
I'm an atheist. I'll respond to this part: "I think the right answer is to tell them that the thing that they call reality -that’s what you call God". What firsts pops into my head is, when I look at reality, I don't see something that's all good and all loving at all. I won't list all of the horrible things that go on but I feel you can get my drift. 99.9% of the universe is so unfitting for human life that it would obliterate the body within seconds. How is that all loving and all good?
Actually, the Bible itself has verse after verse about how the "world" is so wicked and that one shouldn't be "of" it. The world is essentially our reality. Reality is so cruel that, in order to survive, a species must maim, steal and kill. If reality is equal to God, reality seems to be cruel and cold to the utmost degree.
@@Mr_M1dnight @Mr_M1dnight I mean to your first point about the emptiness and lethality of space, that should have no bearing on how loving reality is. What if we're not meant to go into space - it's like a toddler crying because they're not allowed to go past the baby fence to where the stairs are. It's not like reality is forcing us to go to space or other planets.
The world clearly has a lot of pain and suffering in it, no doubt. But it also has good things in it - not only that, the good things seem to be designed to overpower the bad things. Sure, some people are depressed: but this is recognised as an abnormality or a disorder. Most people believe that life is worth it, and most people throughout history have believed that it's worth it and that bringing children into it is worth it. To survive, members of some species have to kill members of other species, this is true - but I don't buy the claim that this is immoral. It's not immoral for me to kill a chicken, nor is death such a catastrophe that its presence in the universe makes it evil. Death is a part of life, in many ways it is what makes life precious in the first place. As for pain and suffering as apart from death, it seems that you can't have death without them, in a sense. They're mechanisms to make us avoid death because life is precious. If we didn't have pain, it would be because life isn't precious, and that would be a much worse universe than the one we have.
@@Mr_M1dnight yes, it would be more accurate to say "the thing you call 'goodness' is what I call God". The way God manifests is in things being properly ordered. To the extent anything is not good, it is disordered and not oriented toward God, and is moving toward nonexistence.
Darkness doesn't exist, it's the absence of light. The vacuum of space doesn't exist, it's the absence of matter. That nonexistence will kill you if you throw yourself into it; the same has long been said of the sea. (Of course the sea is made of matter, but it's formless chaos; no order oriented toward life.)
So, when a person is cruel to others, that's a person acting out values out of order. That disorder if allowed to spread more disorder will eventually bring that person death. People who behave this way become mentally disordered, and perhaps eventually lose the ability to repent of their actions. Of course they might also end up physically dead in one way or another as a result of their behavior.
william james says this in his varieties of religious experience. the mystical realm, or whatever you like to call it, has concrete real world effects on us as people- therefore it is not irreal.
“Catholic” Ireland is one of the hardest western countries in which to have faith. Growing up there in catholic schools was like doing a PhD in practical atheism. The fruits of which we can see today in a country intoxicated by liberalism. Lucky for me I left a long time ago and eventually found Orthodoxy and came home (to Christ ….. most unworthily).
Gotta be honest, this was the attitude that made me an atheist back in the 90's. There's a certain pride to Christocentrism and Defaultism that still hasn't sat right to me in the 30 years since, despite my return to theism. I may never have become an atheist if my questioning were better met by options of exploration instead of "just believe" and (more implicit in the video) "Christianity is the only option even worth considering".
And hot-take... It's a shame that the video opened by accused a _very real demographic of people who want to believe in God_ of being bad-faith and lying. You know, we've **all** been burned a little by New Atheists, but maybe let's not lower ourselves to their level.
You can't "choose" to believe. Belief isn't a matter of choice, it's a matter of *experience.* What we believe is that which we hold true to a sufficient degree that we will act on it. That's not something you can choose.
Think it's something you can choose? Then choose to believe that gravity doesn't affect you and walk off the top of a tall building. You won't do it. You won't do it because *you don't and can't actually believe it.* If belief were something we could simply choose then the above exercise would be a trivial one to undertake. But only the most insane would actually go through with it. Only the most insane can truly *choose* to believe things.
And so we're left with the things that cause our beliefs in the first place: experience and thought. Thought, because you can work out something in your own mind enough to come to believe it, but *you have to believe that which underpins it first.* And experience, because experiencing something is the direct means by which we learn about the world.
This is why belief in God is a matter of faith in the end. I define faith as belief in that which you cannot, even in principle, demonstrate to others. The belief comes about through some sort of experience.
The above is why evangelical Christians are utterly wrong in their claim that we can just "choose to believe". We can't.
Most insightful comment I've read in this channel's comment section yet.
Your argument is based on the false assumption that "belief" in God is the same concept or category as belief in gravity and so on. The holy Fathers understand "belief" in God much differently, that is, as a virtue that has to be trained and cultivated like e.g. patient endurance, mercy, meekness and so on. There is a movement of the will towards enacting the virtue and then of course it is reinforced through feedback from reality which you expressed as experience. But you are not passive with regards to belief, you choose to act a certain way and then you experience reality accordingly and that nourishes belief, that is cultivating the virtues.
@@user-tp7wi4lt2b "Your argument is based on the false assumption that "belief" in God is the same concept or category as belief in gravity and so on. The holy Fathers understand "belief" in God much differently, that is, as a virtue that has to be trained and cultivated like e.g. patient endurance, mercy, meekness and so on."
References to that would be *most* welcome. In any case, if what you say is true then "belief" is the wrong term for us to be using for this, because that which can be trained is not belief in the commonly understood sense of the word but is instead either capability, skill, or characteristic.
I'm very, *very* reluctant to use a word to mean something other than its widely understood meaning, except where heightened precision demands it (as is the case with "faith"). "Belief", like any other word, has a widely understood meaning that matches the use to which I'm putting it but which does *not* match the apparent use to which the Church Fathers are putting it. The problem with redefining terms like that is that it makes it possible to *mislead,* by using a term to mean one thing when it is understood to mean something else. I do not accuse you or the Church Fathers of that, but it's something to be very cautious about, as it is a technique that the radical left uses in order to advance its agenda (see, e.g. how they use the term "racist"). If it is truth that we pursue, then we must be as clear in our meaning as possible, and that demands the use of the most widely understood meaning of the terms we choose, and if we insist on using some other meaning for a term then we must state that alternate meaning up-front so that all understand what we mean by what we say.
Finally, how does one *train* to believe in God? More precisely, how does one acquire the *initial belief* through training? I know of no means by which to achieve that. My belief in God came upon me as a result of experience, as a result of what I saw. It was a *realization,* not something that I acquired through training.
So given the above, *exactly* what do you mean when you say to someone that you believe in God? It clearly cannot mean that you hold the existence of God to be true, or that you hold various characteristics of God to be true. For it to be something that is trained or cultivated, it cannot be something you hold true, it has to be something else, because *what you hold true is not something you can choose but is instead the result of experience.*
I didn't start praying because I believed in God; I came to believe in Him because, out of my need for recovery, I started praying...
🙏
I would love to hear you do a detailed, not necessarily long, breakdown of neoplatonic metaphyiscs and how it interfaces with this understanding of symbolism and attention. Basically what happens when, instead of Love, you put Unity as the highest good. What are the strengths and weaknesses of that.
I was an atheist that didn't want to believe in God. Then God came in and metaphorically broke my teeth in to get my attention. I believe in God now. Every kneel will bow, either by crook or by hook 😂.
Yeah right
I found this short talk immensely useful, thanks
Me, too! How Christianity is good at producing stupid believers -- that's what I discovered!
I gave God an inch and He took a mile. 😊
Seriously though, ive been a Christian 15 years now. And it true, you just need faith as small as a mustard seed to get started.
The problem is people like myself have done those things but still come back empty handed. It ls those who want to belive and want it to be true but no evidence that creates deep heart breka. If life works out for you, relatively well then Yes believing is easier. Just doesn't make it true
Then the problem isn't wanting faith, the problem is expecting fruit to be produced immediately. Before a tree sprouts and produces fruit, it seed must be planted in the ground and die, so it can give way to life. Likewise in the life of living by faith, you need to let your desire for immediate results die, then you'll see the fruits of it grow. It's a paradox, but this was a hurdle I overcame when I was in your shoes. It takes time.
More specifically, I'd encourage you to find a local Orthodox Church and participate in the community and get to know the priest, talk to him!
Don't give up! Life doesn't work out for Christians; you should not think that you have come back empty-handed because life did not work out for you. True Christianity is about suffering for Christ, denying oneself for Christ, and always getting up, knowing our home is not of this world, it is too imperfect for that. Those who expect a good life from Christianity hope in vain and will fall. You should expect to be cursed out, spit upon, suffer, and finally to be crucified. If you choose to put your faith in him, you will come to see the connections and see Christ everywhere, even in the depths of your suffering. There will be nothing you will look at and not see him in that thing. If there is something I would die for it would be this, because I have experienced it after struggling to put my faith in him despite the sea of evidence before my eyes - and there is more evidence you realize. But all of this is only possible if you pray and read scripture daily and make spiritual progress even if that means falling and never ceasing to get back up, for "those who endure until the end will be saved". Whenever your mind is not occupied with anything in particular, say "LORD JESUS CHRIST, HAVE MERCY ON ME, A SINNER!" and make the sign of the cross whenever you are tempted. Say the Our Father multiple times a day. Always give thanks to God before and after meals, even if just mentally. Pray in the morning and at night. And perhaps most important of all, follow your conscience, always, for those who for some reason could not believe in Christ, whether because they lived before the incarnation or for other reasons will be judged based on following their conscience, because your conscience belongs to the nous, your spiritual organ with which you perceive the still small voice of God within. Realize that this world with all of its imperfections is not your home. You long for God because he has planted the memory of paradise in your heart and you have nostalgia for it.
P.S.: I recommend finding an Eastern Orthodox Church nearby, attending it every Sunday, and talking to the priest! God bless you!
I have come to see the capacity for faith to be a developmental process. There has to be milestones to accomplish before higher stages of growth can occur, not always in a neat linear manner. Disorder, disease, disfigurement, regression, abuse, etc can all disrupt this process. So if you can't find your self to come to faith, but want it, you may still be activating that neuronal activity that corresponds to spiritual communication, so then it takes grace to finish healing you and you may need to develop some baseline beliefs before you can come to faith. If that activity is occuring, you may be in closer proximity to God than you think or feel. That activity may not be an indicator of salvation since faith comes by hearing/receiving and transforms by witnessing/confessing. Especially so if you've received the indelible mark on your soul that us baptism. Think of faith as an assent to the spiritual and the beginning of communion with God. And that faith also goes through a developmental process. I know it sounds kind of woo'ish, but I am taking the apophatic spiritual doctrine that goes back to the teachings of the Early Christian Fathers, especially reformulated with a Thomistic background in the teaching of St. John of the Cross's dark night of the soul.
@@olubunmiolumuyiwado you people even try to listen to an atheists perspective, or just jump straight to the gaslighting, telling them how they'redoing it wrong? He said nothing about expecting immediate feedback. He didn't even say he was done searching.
Is it so unfathomable to you that people's minds work differently and what works for you may not work for others?
@@amaizenblue44 God as the source of reality isn't about "people’s minds working differently" but about misunderstanding Orthodox Christianity or expecting God to work on your timing; pride or impatience.
Reality follows patterns, with God as its source. Matthieu Pageau discusses this in "The Language of Creation". Unless you're a solipsist, you recognize reality exists and follows divine patterns with different forms: Soul + Body, Husband + Wife, Leader + Follower, etc.
Struggling with faith often comes from blindness to these patterns or pride in thinking you're above them. Christ warns about this when speaking of "the eye as the lamp of the body."
That's why I advised taking it slow-engage in Orthodox worship, talk to a priest, and participate in divine patterns to see how they lead to Christ, the God-man, revealing the path/pattern to eternal life.
Pageau puffin that Stogie is taking me out 😂
The way we come to believe things to have an identity is to draw a boundary around different patterns which seem to work together towards the same purpose, but the patterns are finite and scientific proof requires measurable evidence.
It doesn’t work well for infinite patterns and by nature, for transcendent beings, nothing will work because by virtue of existing you’re already too limited to “see” the wholeness of God
Yup you've got it, science measures finite patterns that are measurable by human standards. But what about patterns that are beyond measurable, or only partially discernable?
This is what the ancients were correctly and intuitively able to grasp about reality. If there are patterns that measure us, we ought to know how to live according to the right patterns lest we are led astray and perish.
Mr. Pageau please do more videos on this theme, a miniseries or something 🙏
Why am I so sad and disappointed to see Johnathan smoking? That was a shock.
I’m glad to see that he is enjoying himself and letting loose a little. But wow. Surreal.
I was a little surprised too, but I don't think it is much of a problem. From my own experience I can tell you that smoking a cigar is way different than smoking a cigarette.
The cigarette is about the nicotine, but the cigar is all about the taste (which is why you don't inhale it into your lungs). Cigars actually taste and smell pretty good, similar to vanilla, while cigarette smoke just kinda stinks.
Personally, I think that it is not a problem to have a little treat like a cigar or a good wine when in good company, as long as it doesn't become a habit. I'm not saying that you suggested otherwise, I just thought that it was worth mentioning.
@ thanks for that
Jonathan is a HERO.
I can’t explain faith easily, but it works for me.. maybe I’m unique. I chose to believe aspects of Christianity, and from that have received dreams, pictures, and so forth of things I would have no way of knowing, but ended up being true, which directly resolved problems and changed my circumstances when I followed through. Many people want God to fit in a box that aligns with how they see the world and how they think it should be.. and reject Christianity when it doesn’t fit with their boundaries of what they think God should do. 🤷♂️
This is an excellent point. I shall try to avoid saying that from now on.
I loved this part of the discussion so much. But something I wonder about as someone who wants to believe but struggles to - are we allowed to say the nicene creed? I feel like its somewhat disingenuous to say the creed if you're not sure if you really believe it, even if you want to live as a Christian?
If you really genuinely wanted to believe with all your heart, I would see nothing wrong with saying the creed. It is very admirable that you want to be careful with what you choose to say but in a liturgical context as someone wanting to believe, it feels completely appropriate to pronounce those words with a spirit of “Lord I want to believe help me to trust these words.”
God bless you!
@@grantcleveland4506 This reminds me of the Bible verse where the man says "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”
@@Crime_Mime wow do you know the verse?
@ The verse is Mark 9:23-25
@@Crime_Mime thank you
I remember being 11, and never ever getting it. I was what some call a "Fire insurance clent" up until the age of about 16. I argued at age 11, that people either got, or didn't get what I called a mental "God circuit." When I tried to explain to those above me that "I just can't get it" I was either seen as impossible or just told to pray even harder. It was absolutely useless to me.
The "Help my unbelief" prayers were like saying something into a void and expecting something to show up.
I did what I called "The boring God stuff" as a kid waiting for the "SAVED!" moment that's supposed to happen. It never did.
I like Paul Vanderklay for not dismissing such concepts as absurdities or excuses. In some of his videos he talked to such people and treated them as genuine.
I later called it "Inability to switch ones mind into genuine belief in God mode."
Some people may hate the concept I called the "God circuit." Some may hate the "Switch that actives belief in God mode." Some may complain about such concepts as mechanical thinking. Problem is, that is often the nature of aspies. They cannot make their minds think in mysterious spiritual ways.
I probably hated the reddit atheism movement because I saw them as absolutists, chasing the false idols of active antiracism and other PC, SJW, and woke movements.
2:38 Yes, I was stuck with the Southern Baptist Convention as a kid, and was stuck with hellfire and brimstone sermon paranoia. Pascal's Wager combined with paranoia. Nobody ever said anything of Pascal's Wager back then. I discovered it online when ranting about how much I hated the way I was seen when I was younger.
5:34 It makes me think of a high priority in my life that I cannot adequately explain. It is the burning desire I have had for a trip to Japan. I was 5 and got it in the year 1989. Around age 7, I had reached this absurd conclusion that it was made by Nissan and Nintendo. However, I later realized in my teens that it couldn't have been a reason, I knew other kids with the same influences and never got the desire. I thought maybe it was all those photos of Tokyo at night and being told it's 10 years in the future. If you have seen those pictures, odds are at least one included Shibuya Crossing. I then concluded that futuristic neon lights couldn't be an explanation, I had seen Times Square NYC in 1994 and the Las Vegas Strip in 1995. I went through other ideas and concluded I may never outsmart my own desire. Hearing Joker's "If I have to have an origin story, I prefer it to be multiple choice" may not have actually been an answer for me, but it did make my feelings a little more tolerable.
"What do you say when people tell you they don't believe in God?"
"Pfft, yeah right! I don't care." "Have you considered being a hypocrite?"
I'm gobsmacked, almost speechless.
Exactly, what an awful answer. Way to make people believe even less
Lol I think that flew over ya head mate... obvious sarcastic humor...
So much this❤
Goes so hard 🎉
"Not believing" is also a faith based position.
Not really true. Yes, atheism is a position, but most non-believers just don’t know what to believe and struggle to lock in on one belief system.
@@thomasjames24306 Yeah that's also true.
I get what you mean. Not for those who are truly unsure, but for people who take some pride in being a "skeptic" and not being swayed by any amount of evidence, history, reason, etc.
They have faith in their decision not to accept it.
It doesn't have to be.
There are atheists who actively believe there are no gods.
And there are atheists who simply haven't been convinced either way.
You can call the second group agnostic if you want, but it doesn't get anywhere in conversation because of how THEY define atheism.
It doesn't do any good to argue about definitions. Just get on the same page and go from there.
A majority of atheists you talk to on UA-cam, especially these days, don't see atheism and agnosticism as two different hierarchies of belief, but that on speaks of belief (atheism) and one speaks of knowledge (agnosticism).
It is not traditional in philosophical discussions to define it that way, but neither is it a new concept. It's been around for 100+ years, and has just gained a bit of ground the last couple decades.
Thanks
Believing in God, in general, is the easy part. Sifting through the mountains of false doctrines of each and every denomination is the troubling part.
That's what RC Sproul said, too. If you don't believe there's a God, it's not an intellectual problem, it's a moral problem: you don't like the God you know exists. Really, that's just a summary of the last half of Romans 1.
It's comforting in a weird sense to know that even the Israelites in the desert with Moses who saw God for themselves couldn't believe (which is insane because they believed in anything including child sacrifice) and Jesus saying blessed are those who haven't seen yet believed, implying he knew how hard it is to believe. Heck most of the old testament is just trying to get the Israelites to believe
Environmentalism and social justice are secular gods along humanism.
I don't understand why no one addresses _the main_ response to Pascal's wager here: that belief isn't something that you get to choose. If one knows something is false, one _cannot_ then choose to believe in its truth. If one has cause for doubt and cause for affirmation, then one cannot excise any of these causes, so then their belief remains suspended. Belief is deterministic like this. I know Pageau and Peterson cite James to rebuff this, but I'd strongly encourage them to familiarise themselves with Pierce's utter demolition of James on this point, to such a point that he stopped writing on philosophy. The choice of belief introduces just too many problems.
Otherwise, I am an atheist. I would very much like to believe in the god of the bible; it would be better if they were real than not in my opinion. The central issue for me is the incoherence of the Aquinus-ian properties ascribed to god (omni-x), but the necessity of that god to need those properties. God is _not_ synonymous with value hierarchies; god is metaphysical - he causes the value hierarchies, as he causes the natural world, but he isn't identified with them. I think there is a unity between the moral and natural world - I consider it the central appeal to the monotheistic worldview - but I don't think that god is _necessary_ for that unity.
Ive never understood the position of "wanting to believe but not being able to." People don't believe in things because they have proof. People believe in things because they want to.
Justifiying belief is very hard and requires a level of honesty and critical thinking most people have no access to.
The way I think of it is ants can never see and know mountains because they’re too small. We can see mountains because we’re greater than ants. But God is that for which everything is an ant and He is the mountain.
like peterson tries to say, its not about what you declare but how you live. there's about 10 layers of atheism between thinking there may be a god to believing he is your personal saviour or whatever
Take the Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith
Not belief, trust. Grace leads to faith leads to belief.
Why is it so hard to believe there are atheists who think the idea of a blissful afterlife (or a loving creator, a faithful confidant, etc.)sounds great...but just cant believe its true?
Not a huge fan of the "bro" format, with cigars, book shelves, black shirts and wood paneling. That being said, I wish it went on less tangents. Scratching too many surfaces, not enough digging, despite a few nuggets from Pageau.
Essentially not a fan of masculinity.
I know right? The cigars thing seems so try hard.
@@herbertfilms6150 He's owned a cigar store for many years
@@herbertfilms6150 Only if you think smoking a cigar is acting. Get a grip and stop projecting.
@@AliciatheChoCancer or addiction is not masculine or Godly
5:12 the problem with this take is faith in these things actualize and become a reality at some point.
With faith in God, there seems to be no end in sight that ever comes about. It never turns into anything like having faith that you’ll get married or have kids. Faith in God is entirely dependent on what comes after death, which means there is no way for it to materialize during our lives.
Look at the Saints in Orthodox Christianity, like St. Paisios, St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia, St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco etc. These are the realization and real tangible end of faith in one's life, that is, the transformation and deification of the whole human being.
To this whole 'they're lying' route: This is dodging the question. Suppose they really are lying. What about the children of these people?
When people say they want to believe in God but can’t they are expressing that the worldview they grew up in conditioned them to scrutinize their own intuition and they can’t get rid of that programming. It’s a tough spot to be in because your entire way of thinking was molded to kill your spiritual and intuitive faculties in the west.
Nah, born and raised conservative Christian, remained so until my mid 30's.
just like Peterson your version of God is not what people are referring too belief in.
Experience trumps explanation.
You don't get to choose what you believe. You automatically believe what the sum of your lived experiences has taught you.
Are you stating that as a matter of truth or as an expression of your lived experience?
@@briancredo5301The magic rabbi is not real, get over it.
I've been saying this for years. But now Jonathan says it and everyone listens?
Why!? Just because he says it calmly while I rant about it like a crazy person? Grow up.
Rhetoric is very important when communicating. It's what differenciates something from "Good" to "Very Good".
St Paul says that it's important to salt your words with Love. Salt brings out flavour in food and preserves it quality and freshness.
Likewise, if you focus on seasoning your words with Love, you will sow the words deep into a persons heart and also preserve it there for a very long time.
Take the extra time to do that, and on what Saint Paul taught I promise you that you'll see changes in your interaction with people you know in real life.
Is everyone listening? I felt this response was pretty weak and closed-minded. If he can't understand what this people are saying then maybe he isn't as wise as he thinks he is.
They have Moses and the Prophets. If they do not believe them, they will not believe even if someone rises from the dead.
Only to raise someone from the dead not long later.
Man! Alma 32 in the Book of Mormon is all about this conversation. Fun conversation to listen to!
Unbelievable. I am one of the people youre talking about. I cant believe but I want to, and your response is to call me a liar? Thats absolutely out of touch. Possibly insane. Definitely insensitive.
And yes, ive tried cognitive disaonance, going to church, prayer, reading the bible. It doesnt work when you see its not real.
Did you have an open mind? Were you open to receiving unexpected truths? Did you try for long? Did you struggle?
@@yecksdYou're just going to invalidate them and say the same thing no matter what response they give you.
Can that guy stop taking Jonathan on tangents. I'd like him to finish his thoughts??
This is a thing called "friends talking with each other."
@chrisgeorge3107 thank you for your nonsense reply. There's always one.
7:59 Wait, why can't atheists do this?
Now tell it to Jordan.
What stogies are you guys smoking??
The adds for this were overtly demonic. Interesting
Guys, if something doesn't make sense, take that as a sign that it's likely a bunch of nonsense. You don't need religion but what it may offer you -- community, purpose, rituals, a connection to the past, a trajectory for the future, and so on.
Restored my faith
Jonathan once again innocently proved his ignorance without realizing it. Classic 😊
what are you talking about?
@@SnoozlerJonathan or you
What are YOU talking about?@CarlosVargas-jz8gl
Why would you want to believe in imaginary beings?
To have a reason for living and some source of comfort/stability.
@alive063
The “you” that wakes up tomorrow is imaginary.
why would you want to just believe the physical reality is all that exists? Everything around you is decaying. Nothing that you see, hear or feel will lasts forever. If you truly embraced that perspective to it's fullest your whole existence becomes nihilistic. Why go to the bathroom when you need to pee? might as well just piss your pants, everything is wasting away to nothingness anyway. People might think youre weird, who cares, their thoughts and opinions will die with them. Live this way for 1 week and I bet youll be wishing something beyond the physical realm exists. That realm is where God exists, where true life exists.
@@ninjason57 Nihilism isn't actually as bad as it is presented or seems. Exaggerations and misunderstanding however unfortunately end up giving it a bad rep.
@ Go live your life as if it has no inherent meaning, purpose, or value. Live without any sense of moral truth. Go fulfill every desire that pops into your mind despite the consequences. If you still believe it's not as bad as it seems then you're lying to yourself.