Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mauls@warwick.ac.uk (The Chief Slime Monster) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Faith on feelings? Message-ID: Date: 11 Dec 89 09:26:13 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: The Thargoid foundation for penetrating thought Lines: 107 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu A friend of mine said recently, "You can't base your faith on feelings.". This was related to a discussion on what might be described as "spiritual emotional feelings". The way I see it, everything we perceive is through the medium of feelings. However, the feelings we get from reading the Bible, or from talking to other people about God, are usually very different from any of these "spiritual emotional feelings" that people may experience at church or when they think they are close to God. The later is very much less on an interlectual level and some people see this as a reason to not trust these type of feelings. I presume this is because they are worried because their, "mind", isn't in control as much. Can we trust our feelings and take it for granted that we are not kidding ourselves and that our subconsciouses are not playing tricks on us? It is a very difficult question, but, as every philosopher or thinker who has trodden on this ground knows, as soon as you start doubting the input of your senses you end up with the only knowable fact being your existance. This is a futile exercise and proves nothing, but it does demonstrate that whilst the senses are imperfect, they are all we have! If we don't have *faith* in our senses, then we would never get out of bed in the morning for the fear that what we perceive to be the sofa is in fact a ten foot cheese breathing dragon! So what does all this add up to? Well, if we feel that we haven't had a shave for a long time, we have sufficient implicit faith in our senses to act upon them and to shave, is it then dangerous to act upon feelings or perceptions of God? Someone has a feeling which purports to be an experience of God. Something has caused that feeling. The cause is either God or not! The only reason we could have for doubting the validity of the experience would be if something else that was not God was creating this tremendous illusion or forgery. What or who is capable of such trickery? 1) Drugs... Unlikely, most Christians are aware of any narcotics in their system! 2) Your conscious mind... Since you are testing the validity of the experience with your conscious mind, you would know of it's origin. 3) Your sub-conscious mind... This *should* be a genuine worry until you have done enough research into it. If your subconscious mind is trying to fool you then it obviously *wants* your conscious mind to believe it was God. You are trying to force yourself to believe in God despite not having enough evidence for your conscious mind to believe. This is bad! I think a solution is; when you are building up experience of God, to keep a close eye on what your motives are. I think the correct ( only? ) motive for becoming a Christian is that God is real to you and you want to give your entire life to Him and serve Him, *regardless of what that may entail*. If you are getting into it for the wrong reasons then I imagine the thought of giving your life to Jesus and doing anything that he asks would be very worrying, because it threatens to take away whatever it was that you were hoping of getting out of Christianity. Though my personal faith has it's up's and down's like everyone elses, for the vast majority of the time, the doubts I have that maybe my sub-conscious is playing tricks on me remain low. However, if you want to avoid slipping into blind-faith, "keep on the ball". There is never a time in my opinion to stop thinking of these things. 4) Satan... I know from personal experience that Satan can construct experiences that appear to be of God. At first glance it can seem like we have no hope of telling who is putting these things in our heads. I think the key lies with prayer. If God is working in our lives, any revelation or vision or experience that He chooses to give us will not just be an isolated event, but I believe that it will fit into your life like a jigsaw piece. Life with God should not be like charging up a capacitor every time it looses it's charge, but a continuous relationship, this is implied by giving your life to Jesus. Therefore, the closer you are to God, the more the Devils deceptions will stick out like a sore thumb. Cheese, this has got longer than I thought! :-)) To finish, what I think is:- If you analyse your motives constantly, and you live a life so as to minimise the trash that you suspect gets between you and God, then you can reduce the probability of being, "duped", with feelings to very small, and you can get on and enjoy good feelings, trusting that they are the products of an enhanced relationship with God and nothing else. Thank you for listening, The Chief Slime Monster. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- for each $i in { comments, criticisms, insults, prayers, visions, thoughts, opinions } mail mauls@warwick.ac.uk < $i end ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [My own view of faith is that it is a kind of intellectual courage. I see it as having two aspects: (1) the courage to commit ourselves to God even though we are never going to get completely unambiguous evidence; (2) the courage to hold onto what we believe in the face of momentary discouragement. However I would argue that ultimately it must be grounded in some good reason to believe. It's one thing to have faith to keep going when for the moment everything seems to have turned against us. It's something else to have "blind faith" in something for which there was no good evidnece to begin with. I don't expect to see completely air-tight proofs, but I am also suspicious of people who cannot come up with any reasons for what they believe other than that they take it on faith. --clh]