A Personal Reflection on Challenges to Faith
The biggest challenges to Faith in my life come from the people around me. People tend to influence me a lot. What I say often depends on who I'm with, and how I act depends on whether I'm comfortable with who I'm with at the time. I try not to attract attention to myself so I'm just quiet. This is a problem in places like church because a lot of people don't sing and I feel weird being the only one singing and I'm afraid people will mock me for doing it because most people seem to have little Faith or not care about it at all. I can just not sing, which is also a lot easier. I also always see certain guys get what I want to get and so I have a tendency to want to be like them. This includes acting like them which involves not being very Faithful.
I also face challenges from atheism because a lot of it makes sense to me. Really the only place I see God is in the distant past, 2000 years ago. With all the bad things that have happened in the world recently it's hard to believe in a loving, all powerful God who would allow all these things to happen. Atheism also appeals to my sense of logic because of rational explanations like those of Thomas Hobbes. Why wouldn't we be any different from animals? What makes us special?
This brings me to rationalization/science which tells me Faith doesn't make sense. There seems to be no good reason for risking one's life or leaving your comfort zone for something that we can't even be sure exists. How could someone come back from death when we see the devastating, real, and lasting effects of it everyday? We can explain nearly everything that happens around us, and Faith can't be explained, so what makes it a real and necessary part of life? Science also presents definite answers to things while theological things are open to interpretation and aren't always straight forward. It's a lot easier for me to have a clear cut direction to something than to have to make up my own path to Faith as I go.
Dehumanization in the media also presents a challenge to my Faith. The media presents me with easy fixes to things that the church says I have to work hard for. Why should I strive to be virtuous when I can buy products that allow me to do this easily? Why should I work hard for something when I'm always given easier ways to achieve the same thing? I'm shown (by the media) that women are items and this just makes girls act like they are. Like they should flaunt their sexuality. This makes it harder to oppose the other things that the media presents to me because look at this, I end up seeing a lot of things I might not see until my wedding night because of what they do, so they're doing something that makes me happy (and it really shouldn't make me happy, but sadly it does). In short the media makes things that would require a lot of work easily attainable.
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