What are the major challenges to your faith? You've seen many from the Readings and video and I'm sure you have heard many from teachers over your first two years at St. Louis University Highschool. This could be about faith (your ability to have faith in others, yourself, life) or Faith ( your ability to have faith in God). What are the biggest challenges to faith in your life here and now? What are the biggest challenges to Faith in your life here and now? This must show a lot of reflection upon the content of this section. You MUST address the issues of atheism (practical atheism if it applies), scientism and dehumanization through out consumerist culture.
My challenges to Faith involved with theology for the most part center around my lack of experiential knowledge of God. I find it very difficult to reason to a beign that noone has seen. God is said to be alive in the scriptures but I many times find the Bible to outdated and difficult to put into a modern context. Idea's of shepards, etc. just do not apply to the modern times. Also, the time during each day is very limited as I have school for most of the day, go lift weights , then come home and do homework, I many tiems find myslef losing time to spend with God and thus losing part of my faith in him. I find that as I get busy the first thing I push out is God, and that everytime I push him out I lose part of my Faith. My best resolution to this is to set apart a regular reflection time that I can look back at my day and allow God to speak to me. But still when I am busy this schedule gets worked around. Finally, my last major challenge to Faith is modern society that basically says going to Church is uncool. It is difficult I find at times to maintain a balance of my friends and things like church when I might sometiems try to hide my Faith from my friends.
The idea of practical atheism fits very well with my current condition as I say I am Catholic but I ususally do not go to mass and very rarely practice its requirements except at school. Instead, I find scientism and especially the logic that comes with it very reasonable compared to all the ways of solving problems that I am developing at SLUH. Finally, Dehumanization is a major problem that is very real in my life. I find myself focusing more on material objects instead of true feelings. Sometimes I do compensate my lack of an emotion with a product that is supposed to supply me with that emotion.