Be true, unbeliever.
Who doesn’t know how doubt lifts the hem of its nightgown to reveal another inch of thigh before the face of faith?
Religion is poetry. The great abuse of religion is that so many should treat it like prose.
If Jesus is the model of perfect faith, and his twin is Thomas, who models doubt, then what we understand is that faith and doubt are not antitheses—they’re twins.
Failing to understand the dogma of our faith had always been my go-to excuse for never trying to. Maybe I wanted too much to reign in the center of my own world, leaving no room at the inn for divine suppositions.
There is nothing restful about real faith. Where belief is the easy way out, a comfortable position for pious couch potatoes, faith demands an active engagement with uncertainty. “Doubt,” wrote playwright John Patrick Shanley in the introduction to his drama of that name, “requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite—it is a passionate exercise.” An exercise of the heart, that is, as much as of the mind—not of one against the other, but of the two interwoven, each constantly challenging and thus enriching the other.
So let's make a deal. I will try to do the best I can to do good in the world. I will serve others, and I will work against suffering. But I have to keep asking these questions about your justice and mercy. And I can't forget about science. Let's just keep talking about this, You an I. I don't ever want to be away from you again. I can't do that anymore.
If God promises certain things to men upon certain conditions, then be strong in faith, knowing that God is right and anything to the contrary is wrong. It is only by faithfully taking God at His Word in all that He says, that faith will grow and become unwavering. When one achieves unwavering faith in what God says, he will receive unwavering answers to his prayers. But when man is double minded and changes his mind every few minutes about what he has asked of God, how can God decide whether the man really wants it or not? Under the circumstances God does not give it to him. When one doubts, he contradicts God's Word that promises him what he has prayed for, and such contradiction cuts him off from the answer.
Doubt can paralyze you, can make you not want to do anything. But if you learn to channel it, to turn those feelings away from yourself and out at the world you can doubt what's impossible.
I tell myself that I have no problem believing in God, if “belief” can be defined as some utter interior I sent to in life that is both beyond and within this one, and if “assent” can be understood as at once active and unconscious, and if “God” is in some mysterious way both this action and its object, and if after all these qualifications this sentence still makes any effing sense.
The only walls that exist are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, exist only because you have forgotten what you have already achieved.
When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.
Let us account for all we see by the facts we know. If there are things for which we cannot account, let us wait for light. To account for anything by supernatural agencies is, in fact to say that we do not know. Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature.
From the house of unbelief to true religion is a single breath; From the world of doubt to certainty is a single breath; Enjoy this precious single breath, for the harvest of our whole lives is that same one breath.
Where else was I wrong? It was the same question I had asked myself when I'd finally sloughed off Christianity. Where else was I fundamentally wrong about life and the universe and how everything worked? Is life a cycle of us realizing how stupid we are over and over again until we die.
Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepticism has entered the soul of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt.
Maybe you doubt, I doubt, don't you? But sure its no help
Doubt is an unwillingness to communicate.
Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.
Doubts in your mind are a much greater roadblock to success than obstacles on the journey.