Rachel Held Evans in “Faith Unraveled” questions every part of her religion, and is not sure how she should be living her life. Evans struggles to fully believe in faith that Christians are supposed to. She has all these questions and doubts, and is looking for answers but struggles to find the answers. Other Christians think what she is doing is unfaithful and she is not a real Christian. She is curious how people who profess Gods’ holy name, but then do not act in a holy way will be judged. Skeptics exist in almost every aspect of life, but when it comes to religion there seems to be a lot more. She struggles to handle some of the questions the skeptics ask and makes her question her religion. Evans also struggles to understand how this …show more content…
strong God can let such bad things happen to people. Evans talks about a lady named June form her town that went around Tennessee trying to get the Ten Commandments in public buildings. June does all this in the name of the LORD, but then she goes and curses her neighbor. Evans wonders how she will be viewed in heaven because she has accepted the LORD as savior, but then does not live like it. She realizes that June has almost created her own denomination, and wonders if she is really doing it for God. At my high school there are people exactly like June, they go to church and claim that they are living by Gods word, but then go out and treat others poorly and make wrong choices. When it comes to their judgment day how will God see them. I have no way of knowing how they will be judged because I only know them for a snapshot of their life, and I do not know how God judges people who believe in him. Other people know Evans is a Christian, so skeptics ask her questions to try and derail her faith. Almost every Christian deals with skeptics asking them questions in some way or another. As Christians these skeptics expect everyone to know every question there could possibly be about Christianity. In reality though Christians do not know every question these skeptics could have; they have their own questions about their faith that they are trying to answer too. Evans deals with these skeptics asking her questions, but she feels like she needs to have an instant answer to give to them. When she does not have one these skeptics think they have bested her, and proved that there is something wrong with her religion. Going to a public high school I had the same dilemma. People knew I was a Christian, so they would ask me questions all the time. I felt the same pressure that Evans faced from these skeptics to have all the answers right away without hesitation. When I did not have the answer the skeptics would act like they got me and proved my religion wrong. This bothered me for a while because I was not able to answer their question and maybe there was a problem with my faith. As I grew up though just like Evans I learned that it was okay to not always know the answer to some of these questions. One of Evans major problems that she faces is she cannot understand how the great and mighty God can let such bad things happen in the world.
She struggles to grasp the concept that he could have stories in the Bible of killing so many people. She thinks this goes against everything he is for in the ways of loving everyone and treating everyone as his children. Even in present time she talks about a girl who was executed in a video she saw, and all the natural disasters. How can this amazing God let all of this happen to his people she wonders. That is something I have always struggled to understand growing up how can God be so evil to his children. The answer I always got was that there was a reason and purpose for everything, and God had a plan for everything. I found that answer hard to believe with all the evil that is in world today. Just like Evans I still struggle with understanding why God does some of the things He does, but I guess that is why He is God and I am …show more content…
me. Rachel Held Evans ask a lot of questions about her face, a lot of the questions are questions that most Christians have.
She just does not blindly follow her faith she asks the tough questions, and she has logical doubts. Just because of that though does not mean she is not a Christian, this is something all Christians should do to strengthen their faith. Evans wonders about what will happen to these Christians that are all talk; they spread the word like they are supposed to, but they do not live the way they are supposed to. How will God see them when they get to judgement day, how will they see her. She deals with skeptics asking her the tough questions, which she does not know and asking herself the same question because she wants to know the answer. The biggest question she has is how can this loving God be so evil and let such bad things happen to his children. How can he just sit back and watch all the killings and all the natural disasters killing so many people? She also wonders how he can kill his children in stories in the Bible. I have had similar questions through my relationship with God, and I am still working through a lot of them in my own way. Like Evans though I am still a Christian that loves God, but I am asking the questions because I do not want to blindly follow God; I want to have a better understanding of him and strengthen my religion. There will always be questions to religion, and nobody will ever know all the answers people have to work through
it in their own ways to get to the answers.
As Author, Amitava Kumar, shares an unusual story that tells of a law that is
His church stopped being my church. And yet, today, because Iʼm a coward, I let myself be initiated into that church. I let my father baptize me in all three names of that God who isnʼt mine any more. My God has another name” (p.5). When she is baptized on her fifteenth birthday, the ceremony has meat nothing to her. She doesn’t believe the Christian thought about sin and salvation. For Lauren, the book of Job is the best description of her father’s God. “God says he made everything and he knows everything so no one has any right to question what he does with any of it” (p.8) Laruen thinks Christian God just like a super-powerful man, who is playing them like playing with his toys. “If he is, what difference does it make if 700 people get killed in a hurricane—or if seven kids go to church and get dipped in a big tank of expensive water” (p.8) For Lauren, the God of Christian is lack of ability to change the world or unable to make the action to help human. And they never ask people to actively recognize that they can control their own destiny, which makes them passive and only wait for the others to save them from their miserable
Finding a way in life can be difficult. Following that way can be even more difficult, especially when it goes against someone's origin. In Acts of Faith, Eboo Patel tells his story of what it was like to struggle through finding himself. Patel asks the question of "How can I create a society of religious pluralism?" throughout the book, and raises implications about what our children are being taught in different societies throughout the world.
Early on Sara had very secular morals and delved deeply into worldly things, never considering looking to Christ for fulfillment (Miles, 9). Miles wasn’t your typical convert either. She is also a lesbian, not that there is anything at all wrong with that, but that is a very controversial topic within the church. In my own experience, my parents are very conservative and don’t exactly agree with gay rights, but they aren’t hateful toward gays. For a long time I thought this way, that it wasn’t right for them to marry, but I wouldn’t say that God wouldn’t love them because I believed, and do believe that He loves everyone. Recently I have come around to the idea that gays should be able to have equal rights. I think this because in all honesty we really don’t know specifically what God wants here, but we do know that above everything else He wants us to love and respect one another. Adding to that, when we slip up I think that is what allows us to have that “hunger” for Jesus in our lives, because we need to rely on Him. As mentioned before Miles came from an atheist background, but her grandparents were missionaries. Her parents had never liked church, and felt that it was illogical to believe in such ideologies and as a result of that Sara adopted a lot of those values (Miles, 7). In a lot of ways I think Sara is still who she is; curious,
Acts of Faith (2005) is a breathtaking account of civil war and genocide in Sudan penned by Phillip Caputo. The characters veritably dance with life among the pages as they try to help the starving multi-ethnic Sudanese tribes. Set in the mid 1990's, there are no clearly defined protagonists or antagonists as Caputo shows in the novel the full circle of human nature, both evil and good, selfish and selfless.
Knowing the truth pushes people to understand reality and to have a meaningful purpose in life. However it is only a small portion of the world that is brave enough to take on the obscene verity of life. These few do not accept what they are told, the crave to know what is beyond each wall, over each mount, and across each ocean. They want their reality to be their own wild and true experiences in nature. Chris went out into the world to seeking truth. Instead of being told or given what he sought, he wanted to find the answers to his own questions. For example, Chris wanted an answer about his...
Faith is something that the author lacks as she only see 's herself as this defiant child. However, this changes as she realizes that she shares a special bond with her grandmother, rather than taking care of her for an obligation. In the very last scene, the author watches her grandmother as she slowly passes away and cries with “sobs emerging from the depths of anguish,” finally realizing that she actually had a very close relationship with her grandmother, developing a type of respect. The author had always felt her grandmother’s gray eyes watching over here, like a safety net, for every move she had made (Viramontes
As children, we are often told stories, some of which may have practical value in the sense of providing young minds with lessons and morals for the future, whereas some stories create a notion of creativity and imagination in the child. In Karen Armstrong’s piece, “Homo Religiosus”, a discussion of something similar to the topic of storytelling could translate to the realm of religion. Armstrong defines religion as a, “matter of doing rather than thinking” (17) which she describes using an example in which adolescent boys in ancient religions, who were not given the time to “find themselves” but rather forced into hunting animals which ultimately prepares these boys to be able to die for their people, were made into men by the process of doing.
The grandmother’s views good/bad was based on how she was raised. Her family was good because they were white, attended church and believed in Jesus Christ. Understanding the true concept of Christianity is another story. During her final moments of life, this grandmother had doubts about her faith (O’Connor 1203).
She creates these characters that are in a state of hubris (overbearing pride and a sense of invincibility towards fate) and therefore are ripe for catastrophe. She puts them in a moment of crisis in which their self-confidence is destroyed or they reevaluate their past lives. This method is emphasized through the main characters Joy and Grandmother; they both tried to use religion against their assailant as a means of escaping their doom. Joy who is an atheist begged the Bible salesman to return the wooden leg insisting that “you’re a Christian...you’re just like all of them…you’re a perfect Christian!” (Good Country 9), and Grandmother in her final moments begged the Misfit to pray and that he was fine people (A Good 384). These epiphanies involves the characters recognition that their “attackers” actions are a result of their hypocritical attitudes and hollow actions. They offer only lip service to spiritual concepts and then go back to their lives filled with materialistic gratification, not really concerned about the people that they affect. So the men refuse these gestures and their hypocrisy because the damage is already done and really they hold little worth to
Lauren's dad believes that God has a plan for them all and he relies on his belief of that as a way to hope that things will be okay for his family and his community. He shows this by preaching in his house on Sundays, and by risking a lot to leave the gated community to get Lauren baptized. After Lauren leaves, her faith and hope in religion sort of switches gears onto the development of her "Earthseed" religion. She adds more of the religion's goals and lessons to her journal daily and even begins to share it with her companions and starts their community based off of the teachings she's created within it. In the end she has hope of “Earthseed” growing and gaining a larger following throughout new
..., suffering, and anguish and understand her struggles to make this world a better one so that we take up the cross because as Smedley puts it, "when one is conscious, one is responsible" (Smedley 255). Therefore, as readers, we become conscious and in turn responsible to continue her work, to be a rip in the fabric of America.
Pope John Paul II once said, “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.” (Fallible Blogma) Based on this significant and powerful quote, one can infer that faith and reason are directly associated and related. It can also be implied that the combination of faith and reason allows one to seek information and knowledge about truth and God; based on various class discussions and past academic teachings, it is understood that both faith and reason are the instruments that diverse parties are supposed to use on this search for truth and God. There are many stances and viewpoints on the issues of faith and reason. Some believe that both of these ideas cannot and should not be combined; these parties deem that faith and reason must be taken as merely separate entities. However, this writer does not understand why both entities cannot be combined; both terms are so closely compatible that it would make sense to combine the two for a common task. Based on various class discussions and readings, there are many philosophers and theologians who have certain opinions regarding faith, reason and their compatibility; these philosophers include Hildegard of Bingen, Ibn Rushd, Moses Maimonides, and St. Thomas Aquinas. The following essay will examine each of the previously stated philosopher’s viewpoints on faith and reason, and will essentially try to determine whether or not faith and reason are ultimately one in the same.
Furthermore, I also explained that it was troublesome for me to believe in something that wasn’t physical. Physical proof was vital for me to understand something completely. Consequently, being able to see, hear, feel or calculate something is essential for me to believe it is true. I told her I that I always focus on finding absolute answers to everything I come in contact with. By the end of our conversation, she realized that her amount of hope amazed me the most. I marveled at her optimism and how she readily waited for something positive to happen out of everything. She always stayed alert for whatever was going to come her way. The belief that God provided aid to promote her success,
Growing up I was raised in a religious household, so, of course, I’m a big believer in God and my faith. To me, God is the creator of all and I believe Judgment Day is going to come very soon.The definition of faith is the belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion. My faith and the reason for my faith goes hand in hand because it makes me know the truth and opens my eyes to this world. Also, I get clarity of why I’m in this world which is to make it a better place. But seeing the world as faith with reason or reason with faith has a few challenges and can make things a little bit difficult. Same goes for science and religion which butt heads a lot. Some may feel that the Big Bang Theory created