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I can't go on

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CaptainBako
Jun 24 2003
02:34 pm

B den BC, I believe telling people who are oppressed by depression and futility that doubt is not a sin is indeed helpful. It was helpful for me. For others, I cannot imagine it ever being harmful. At the least it might not mean much, but again, it was significantly helpful for me.

I believe when you tell someone doubting is ok, BC, you show a strong trust in your faith; by allowing someone else’s doubt you show that you believe there are reasons to believe and there is hope in it, hope even for people doubting almost absolutely, living through a time unremmiting futility. You also show that you see your students’ predicaments to be very real in their lives. You empathise to the extent you can by acknowledging and respecting their doubt. I know it eased my burden to hear years ago that doubting was ok. When you treated it as valid you showed trust in my mind’s capacity to question and—more importantly—a greater trust in the notion that doubt and faith are not irreconcileable. If a lot of people in my christian high school or close to my life had been disturbed, frightened or upset to hear that I’d been doubting back then, if not one person had granted that doubting might even be worthwhile, then during my darkest hour I don’t know if I would have had any hope left in me.

Reviling doubt suggests to me a weakness in one’s faith; if doubt is seen as an agent of evil manifest to pluck away believers, it restricts believers from seeing that when people question things it can eventually lead to strengthened faith and a better understanding of what faith is.

It would seem to me that you’re right about doubting faith, that it’s a struggle that in itself is not sinful. Maybe I too am wrong to say so, but it seems to me that doubt is integral, a necessary part of faith. Faith is ultimately a trust in what we don’t know is certain, a reverence for the [perhaps not completely] unapparent. I think shades of doubt need to accompany faith in order for faith to exist at all.

Whether their certainty is founded or not, when people feel absolute conviction about something, even about truth from God, they experience a sort of knowing. This knowing has no hint of doubt or at least acknowledges none, and as such is an entirely different thing than faith. Yet unlike stalwart knowing, faith doesn’t need to be dropped to the floor, it doesn’t shatter, when we recognize that we don’t know. It is very possible, I dare say it’s certain, for faith—a continually changing, active thing; a journey through life’s raging seas—to remain while doubt persists, even to the ends of our days. As of today, looking out of the crow’s nest at the surrounding waves, I see no other way.