Are people allowed to have doubts

The middle-aged software validation analyst Rob Martin in his Book Review: The End of Unbelief writes

If you frequent enough Christian blogs and websites, you’ll soon discover that there is a perceived threat to Christianity in those people who claim to be either agnostic or atheistic in their view of the divine and faith. {Book Review: The End of Unbelief}

Promotional for wikimania 2008 banner to be added to websites and blogs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We can find lots of atheist blogs writing against Christian Faith but also lots of blogs attacking Christian writers from other denominations than theirs. Certain church blogs or church websites are eager to spit on other church websites or to say other Christian websites or blogs are form the devil.

On the net we can find lots of sites which doubt the existence of God and the existence of Jesus.

The typical response to this “threat” is to argue using logical reasoning and rationality to prove God exists, that Jesus is God, and that in order to live a fulfilled life, one must accept Jesus as savior and make that jump from no belief to full belief in Christ. {Book Review: The End of Unbelief}

Those who say Jesus is God are pushed in the corner by those who say there is no god and as such Jesus can not have existed, though they forget Jesus is a historical figure like Plato, Euripedes, and others have been historical figures. Though often less is written about them nobody doubt that they existed and that they have done what is said about them. Strange then when we have the Nazarene man who was killed because he was too much of a log jam. The impediment Jew, who was to troublesome for the Romans and for the Jewish higher class, priests and Pharisees, was much more spoken off in his time and afterwards than many other historical figures everybody long after their death still accept that they existed. So why doubting about Jesus Christ, whose real name was Jeshua from Nazareth, from the tribe of king David.

When we do call ourselves Christian, which means a disciple of the Christ Jeshua, Christ Jesus, the Messiah or anointed)  we should do everything to know who Jesus was and do everything to follow up his teachings, and not that of other human beings.

Being a Christian we should believe in him who was so many years ago a living soul on this earth. We cannot

fault the belief that Jesus is the way to truth and fulfillment.

Living in this world we can not ignore it and should see what is happening in it and how people are behaving. In this world we also do have to not only observed the world around us, interact with people on a personal level who don’t believe as we do,we shall have to make choice and have to decide how much we would like others to know about our own faith.

We can spent time listening to and reading on different viewpoints of current culture and philosophy, and as Rob Martin points out

the trend towards agnosticism and atheism in Western culture today is not just simply a lack of belief in Jesus. It is much more fundamental than that and requires a different approach than the traditional “believe in Jesus” rhetoric of the past 60 years. {Book Review: The End of Unbelief}

Shane Hayes in his book The End of Unbelief: A New Approach to the Question of God writes

The trend toward agnosticism, atheism, and other forms of unbelief is gathering force, especially among the young. And churches simply don’t know how to counter it.

and presents in this book a fundamentally different approach to apologetics. It is true that the existence or nonexistence of a deity or deities may not be known with certainty, that first principles or absolute truth is unattainable and that only perceptual phenomena are objects of exact knowledge, but that when we look around us and feel in our inner-being we can feel the ‘instinct’ and have that only one divine doctrine: to believe that there is A Divine Creator God. And that is really the only doctrine we should speak of, because all other matters are spoken of in the Bible and can be checked and proven.

Rather than defending Jesus as God, he brings a perspective where in the argument starts, first, with simply taking the step towards believing in a god. His argument is that it is not necessarily so much the existence of a deity that so much prevents people from converting to Christianity but the deity that is so frequently presented as the Christian God. {Book Review: The End of Unbelief}

Problem with many atheists but also with many Christians is that they cannot see the difference between divine, divinity and the Most High Divine. they also do not see to understand that there are titles being used in the world which may not be taken as name or as limited to only one individual, be it someone from this earth or some extraterrestrial being if there may be such beings.

Shane argues not from a perspective of a Christian who is trying to convince atheists to believe but from an agnostic who actually understands this perspective of skepticism and doubt and presents an argument that one can be a theist, even a Christian, and still be an agnostic. This is probably one of the most intriguing arguments that I’ve heard and it makes sense. From Shane’s perspective, there is a lot about believing in the divine and believing in the Christian God that is difficult to swallow from a purely logical and rational stand point. And, based upon some of the more “fundamentalist” arguments of needing to believe in certain literal interpretations of scripture, it seems that one needs to completely suspend their reason and logic in order to believe in the Christian God.

Christian Atheist (Peter Lumsden, d. 2007) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We also do believe Shane is right, that there can be a theist and a atheist, both doubting about matters of religious views and wondering about the or a divine God. Shane also speaks about a Christian God but does not say what he thinks Christians believe to be God or does not specifies the sort of Christians he is talking about or “which Christian God”. The anabaptist writer Martin does not specify that either.

To Martin, Shane and us it makes sense and it is okay to maintain doubts and scepticism.

As a creature, literally one who is created, for me to be able to fully comprehend the Creator and all of the Creator’s reasons and plans and purposes would mean that I would need to be on the level of the Creator myself, which I’m not. So, it makes perfectly rational and logical sense to admit that there are many things that we do not know for certain. And, as Shane points out, this is where faith steps in. {Book Review: The End of Unbelief}

We not only should come to understand our limitations of knowledge, we also should come to live with the acceptance of our limitations and our restricted views on certain matters. For man this is not so simple as it looks at first site. We mostly want to have an high esteem about ourselves and do not want to have others see our limitations and shortcomings. We even less want them to point them out to us. We mostly are too pride to admit that we have limitations and still have very much to learn.

But we should not be ashamed that we do not know everything and that we do still have to learn a lot. Better is to admit that and try to learn more instead of confiding and to be happy with what we think to know already.

When going to start to look for reasons why and how to live, to look for the beginning of life, God and the matters or stories around God His son Jesus we do have to look at the beginning of the world and have to find our place in it.

According to Shane

the best path from atheism to Christianity is not in the immediate jump but to simply take the small step towards a “pure” theism, that being in the belief that there is a deity but that it does not need to be, specifically, the Christian God (or any specific god for that matter). {Book Review: The End of Unbelief}

Undoubted we do have to find the Creator or the starting point first. When we want to know more about Jesus we shall also get to know what he believed how the world came into being, Who is behind everything and what is going to happen next. We shall have to look to the first cause.

Shane his primary argument for theism comes also from the idea of a first cause.

No matter your belief in the beginnings of the universe, at some point there is a first cause is Shane’s argument. Logically speaking, it is just as plausible to believe in a deity as a first cause as any other force.For me, Shane’s most powerful chapter was the trial between faith and reason. This was a very well written allegorical representation of some of the more classical arguments for and against theism with the pro-theist argument taking the perspective that the good of the universe greatly outweighs the bad as an argument for a benevolent deity. {Book Review: The End of Unbelief}

We could say we should first come to the knowledge about the beginning of the universe and about the well or not being a Divine Creator. But that are aspects we leave mostly to be examined by other webpages, because here on this platform we go already one step further, though at certain points we shall not be able to go around the facts to discuss the Creator Himself as well. But our main focus here on this site shall be on Jesus. Because he was already spoken of by the creation of man we shall not be able to skip this facet of his life, plus it will be also very important to brake with the very big misunderstanding of lots of Christians who want to believe in many gods having taken part in the creation (see later in the posting “The very very beginning”)

The onset of this site is not to go deeper into theism. For that there is “Stepping Toes” a.o..

To argue for a theism perspective rather than simply giving a defense for Christianity seems to work best for our post-modern/post-Christian cultural trend. With all the Christians out there who are giving Christianity a bad name in their efforts to re-Christianize society, in their rather prejudiced and unloving ways of interacting, and in their schizophrenic reading of the Bible with Jesus preaching one thing and the Old Testament preaching another, it seems best that if anyone is going to journey away from atheism towards theism, they should first take the relatively small step towards simply believing in a deity. {Book Review: The End of Unbelief}

Today we are too often confronted with Christians giving Christianity a bad name. They often give each other bad names and shout horrible things to Christians who do not believe the same as they. Often they also soon menace the other and threaten with hell, for them a place of damnation and eternal torture. Many people noticing that going on on the worldwibe web, start loosing their interest in the Christian community, considering them a bunch of little children fighting and quibbling all the time with each other.

Today on the net lots of things are presented as

rather matter-of-factly and “well, it’s obvious that…” A true skeptic and atheist would rankle at that kind of presentation and be turned off by it. Perhaps this is part of the problem with all apologetic literature in this post-modern era. Relationships are treasured over rationality and it is difficult to build a relationship with an author when all you have is text on the page. {Book Review: The End of Unbelief}

On this site are focus is only going to be mostly on one part of believe matter in the Christian Faith, namely on the person of Jesus Christ and what he said and how his followers have continued or not in the tradition of this Jewish Master Teacher and how by time several teachers used the teachings of that rabbi in a different way, altering what he said but also altering the person himself as well. We shall see that even the majority of Christians do not any more belief what God the heavenly Father said about His son and what the son himself said about himself and about his heavenly Father. that has become the whole problem of Christendom and making it so much more the difficult for people to find the true path, or the Way Christ Jesus prepared for them.

Do not worry when you have many doubts and question about Jesus and God, the Bible and what is going to happen to the world. If you are also troubled by the many different visions of the many denominations and are disgusted how certain church people behave, like the abusing priests, a.o., always do know that you are then looking at man, human beings with their own faults and limitations. Do not concentrate on their words as always having to be true. Compare all the sayings of people, churches, with what is really written in the Bible and listen to your heart.

By regularly reading the Bible you shall be able to find out a lot. All answers are in it. You just have to look in it, put all human doctrines aside, and believe the words written in the book of books.

We are pleased to find you here and do hope you shall join us in the quest for life, the Way, the path of Jesus Christ our Saviour.

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Related articles:

1. Science, scepticism, doubts and beliefs
2. Written to recognise the Promised One
3. Missional hermeneutics 2/5
4. Challenging claim 3 Inspired by God 2 Inerrant Word of God
5. Challenging claim 4 Inspired by God 3 Self-consistent Word of God
6. People Seeking for God 3 Laws and directions
7. Being Religious and Spiritual 6 Romantici, utopists and transcendentalists
8. Are religious and secular ethicists climbing the same mountain
9. Self-development, self-control, meditation, beliefs and spirituality
10. Patriarch Abraham, Muslims, Christians and the son of God
11. Jesus begotten Son of God #3 Messiah or Anointed one
12. Jesus begotten Son of God #8 Found Divinely Created not Incarnated
13. Jesus begotten Son of God #9 Two millennia ago conceived or begotten
14. Jesus begotten Son of God #18 Believing in inhuman or human person
15. Matthew 1:18-25 – Genesis of Jesus Christ
16. Marriage of Jesus 2 Standard writings about Jesus
17. A Living Faith #2 State of your faith
18. Christianity without the Trinity
19. Church sent into the world
20. Disscusion Questions
21. Anointing of Christ as Prophetic Rehearsal of the Burial rites
22. The Way to life

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