Faith Lost Forever

[aims]

Having recently lost faith in god,
I guess I shouldn't find it odd
that things that occurred yesterday afternoon
caused me to lose faith and trust in people too.
Thanks for simplifying my life!
I now have no faih in god or people
and the only ones I trust are myself, my daughter,
my dog, and my best old buddy of 40 years.

[darkness0within]

I'm sorry to hear how things are going with you aims.

Trust is hard earned, and can be easily lost in the main.

Some find it easy to open up and show some of the many facets of their personalities we all contain within us, while others find it very hard to trust others, especially if there has been a loss of trust in the past.

Some of us lead simple lives in complex worlds, While others live complex lives in simple worlds. The many facets of our personalities are part instinct, part learned as we go through life. So many factors play their part in how we are, and how we react to things in life. And it seems to me that some of these facets never really see the light of day for one reason or another.

You're right in saying that you must have faith and trust in yourself my friend. As the path through life would be a much darker one without that.

[anirbas]

😢😢😢

[phantasm]

I think the fundamental error the Church in the West has fallen into is... (well, there's more than one, but keeping it simple for the purposes of this discussion)

We're taught to believe in God, yes; taught to believe in ourselves, not so much.

Lack of faith in our fellow human beings' essential goodness is destroying "the organization." There is an au natural negativity bias embedded in the human brain. It shines a light on everything that's going wrong in our world. The natural human response could be A) run away (which for all we know contributed to the spread of the human race across the globe) or B) take action to eradicate the source of the negativity in our environment (which has its' bright side... we've built farms, communities, cities, in response to problems-- but has a number of nasty side effects). There are probably other responses based on individual personality types....

We can be taught to overcome our negativity bias. But someone has to actually teach it. There are seeds of this scattered throughout the Bible and when I was a child I seized on them for all they're worth. But the positivity bias in certain Biblical passages wasn't enough. My own positivity bias was massively reinforced by Gene Roddenberry's particular flavor of Humanism. I can tell you, I needed it. If Star Trek had died on the vine in obscurity at the end of the '60s, I would be.................. a completely different person.

Our modern world was and is being built on the scientific ethic. It is (sort-of, mostly, in a way) the antithesis to faith, although there are intellectual models out there that allow faith and science to have their own spaces. The media promote and milk the "science v faith war" for all it's worth. I think we've yet to see the fallout of the choice our culture has made in setting the heart and the mind up as enemies of one another. We are human beings and we have a paradox wrapped up in the core of our being. We are deeply emotional beings, perhaps more complex and profoundly emotional than the bulk of creatures in the animal kingdom. We are also incredibly logical and sensible.

You can't promote the hell out of the one and on revile those who skew towards the other side. It's unstable.

We walk by vision, not by conviction. We know what's in front of us and what's behind us. This helps us live in the present and the past.

We walk by faith, not by sight. We don't know what's in front of us, so we have to create it out of our sense of vision and imagination. This helps us live in the future.

Faith in God and lack of faith in self is a framework that's out of balance, skewed, off-kilter.

The Church in America, by far and away still the largest spiritual framework people are born and raised into, does not teach faith and trust in ourselves.
And then we wonder why people are abandoning the idea of faith in droves.