TO SAY IT IS A SIN TO DOUBT FAITH IS VILIFICATION

 
Religion says that deliberate doubt is a sin. If you cannot help doubting, it is not a sin but it still means you have diminished your commitment to the alleged truth. You are bad either way. Thus the fear, guilt and shame that comes from doubt may encourage you to keep your doubt to yourself or to avoid it. By feeding those, religion creates a remarkably effective means of silencing doubt.
 
Doubt is supposedly bad for it is undermining truth.
 
Doubt is supposedly bad when God tells you something and you doubt it calling him a liar.
 
Doubt it supposedly bad for God says it is a sin.

 

None of these reasons are correct so to condemn doubt is to insult and vilify those who doubt and those who encourage others to doubt.
 
Belief is perceiving something as probably correct on the basis of evidence.
 
A loving God even if he sees advantages in faith will see bigger advantages in spelling out the evidence and justification for faith clearly. He will deal with our doubt not by banning it but by making it less and less likely to happen. He has no choice because if you cannot doubt, the risk of being fooled by fake religion is too great.
 
Faith is belief in a person. It's just belief with the personal touch. Trust is another word for faith. Christians hold that faith has an effect on our actions - we will practice what we believe in if our faith is genuine (James 2 in the Bible).
 
Every religion is based on what it calls faith. Christianity claims to have been revealed by God.
 
Every religion forbids doubt. They sometimes allow doubt as part of the journey towards faith but if you attain faith and doubt afterwards it’s a sin. However if it is not deliberate doubt then, it's not a sin but something that has to be resolved. So religion takes it for granted that for believers to doubt it deliberately, is a sin. If doubt is a sin, then involuntary doubt is regarded as an evil but we are not accountable for it.

Doubt is not a feeling that your faith may be wrong. Faith is not feeling. Doubt is finding evidence that makes you ask yourself if your faith or belief is correct. Doubt can mean either of two things. One, you begin to think that the faith or belief is wrong. Two, you think the faith or belief could still be right but you are noticing things that make you question if it really is right. The first then thinks it is wrong and the other thinks it might be wrong.

The notion that there is an all-powerful all-good God implies that when he makes harmful viruses and bacteria he has a reason for it that justifies it. This is saying that God has a purpose for human suffering. But surely it is normal to doubt the existence of a good God any time you see somebody suffering unjustly and terribly? I am not saying disbelieve - I am talking about doubt.

 

Decency would demand that you doubt. Doubt hurts especially in the face of such pain. It is not true that a believer in God should be happier than an atheist. The worse you suffer or another suffers the more grounds there are for doubt.

 

Real belief does not fear questioning. It welcomes it. Questioning is a sign of confidence and willingness to learn. It is reluctant to question that is a sign that a person only imagines they believe. They don't really.

 

People are conditioned to dislike - or worse: hate - being wrong. This tendency is strongest when it is a religious matter. Learn to like being wrong because you only dislike being wrong when you discover that you are wrong. You can do this by seeing that you learned something from being wrong. You exercised integrity and sincerity and that is what counts . The error is in the past and doesn't matter any more and you have seen the light. If we learn to like

learning that we are wrong we will never be part of the plagues of sectarianism or arrogance or bigotry. People will love us for it for they will see how we are serious about trying to be honest. This reward is worth it. We cannot say we respect the sincere views of others if we hate being wrong.  

Yet some faiths try to stop others from being willing to see if they are wrong in religious matters. 

 

The Roman Catholic Church teaches that it is infallible and irrevocable doctrine that faith is infused by God’s miracle power at baptism. This means that the child that is baptised is not allowed to doubt any information about faith and morals coming from the Church at all. At least pagans are better off for the Church says they can doubt all they want before they are ready for the gift of faith. Infant baptism is vicious and an assault on human rights when it is claimed that it turns a person into a believer and member of the Church, the body of believers.
  
To be a doubt, a doubt has to be sincere. If one tricks oneself in order to doubt that does not make the doubt a sin for it is not real doubt. It is the trickery that is the sin. A doubt can be evil in the sense that it keeps you from the truth but it can never be sinful or intentionally evil. Anybody who doubts knows that it is not a sin. Religion is making something sincere and which is a search for the facts a sin which is slanderous and impossible. They are opposed to doubt because it takes you out of their control. They want your mind.
 
If God or Jesus made doubt a sin like the Bible says they did then they were dreadful people.
 
To condemn doubt as sinful is to say that it should be punished. Catholicism considers doubt to be a mortal sin, a sin that cuts you off God unlike venial sin, which is to say that it will lead to everlasting punishment in Hell. It is so serious because it strikes at the most important thing a Christian is supposed to have, the faith. If it is a mortal sin, that is a great intolerable evil, to commit adultery and if you doubt that it is then you are approving of a serious evil. It would be the same with murder if you only believe it is wrong because of your religion. If doubt is a sin then it is a mortal sin for it approves, whether you like it or not or admit it or not, of this mortal sin. Doubt is always mortally sinful unless it cannot be helped.
 
The doctrine of Jesus is that we must love God with all our heart - that is be dedicated totally and only "value" anything other than God for his sake. He said that this is the greatest commandment and the commandment about looking after yourself and your neighbour has only secondary importance even though it's only to be done for the sake of God implies that authority is the basis of morality. You avoid certain actions because God says so.  Even if we have rational reasons for believing that murder is wrong we use them to prove to ourselves that God is right. We believe then not because of the reasons but because of God. Because he has decreed it.
 
If I believe murder is bad because it hurts and for no other reason then I am not submitting to God but to my thinking. Why believe in God or care about God if that is all I need to think?
 
If I believe murder is bad because God says so and though I see that it is bad for it hurts, my motive is to believe what God wants me to believe God will be happy. This is what Jesus wanted. See the point?
 
The fact that your thinking makes you believe in God in the first place hasn’t occurred to Jesus and Co so people are only pretending that they can obey God out of sheer respect for his authority. It is still all about you. You can't intend to believe in an authority unless you have judged it valid. You cannot follow it from the heart unless you take the authority yourself to give it authority. To realise this truth is the greatest possible sin according to Jesus’ injunction that loving God totally is the one thing you must do no matter what.
 
Faith is the foundation without which a religion cannot be so the claim that doubt is always malicious and evil and sinful IS religion. Everything that a religionist does for their blind and defaming faith is evil for it is done for the love of evil.
 
You may think, “The unbeliever can decide that he was wrong and start to believe in religion. But the religious believer does not have freedom. He cannot claim he has the right to change his mind and maybe lose the faith. This does not make the faith of the religious person illogical or irrational or silly. A secular liberal must hold that it would be wrong for him to become a narrow Nazi.”
 
Who is the most open to reason then? It is the unbeliever. Who is the most humble then? It is the unbeliever. The religious person IS irrational and arrogant. A secular liberal would indeed be very anti-Nazi. But if he changed and became a Nazi he would then have to be very anti-secular-liberal. When we adopt positions whether we care to admit it or not we are rejecting and therefore hindering the power of a party or school of thought. To say, “I am a Protestant but not anti-Catholic or against the Catholic" is a contradiction. If you really think you are right you want other people to believe what you believe and mere membership in Protestantism is depriving Catholicism of a member and is against it in that sense. And if you don’t think you are right then you are not a true Protestant but a fake.
 
The liberal refuses to become a Nazi because he sees Nazism as evil or in some way harmful. As long as he is liberal he will hold that. But he will keep his mind open. If you believe something you have to be in some way against other ideas. But that doesn’t mean you are closed minded.
 
The religious person has to be against other ideas that are incompatible with his or her faith and cannot keep the mind open. They cannot say they are wrong in matters of religious dogma. They claim God has given them superior knowledge and infallible truth. That is the difference.
 
Religion says that you can't get away from faith. They say even the worst materialistic atheist has faith in something even if it is just faith in his scientific apparatus. Christianity says that if you begin to doubt that Christianity is true they say it is because you may have faith that it is not the only true faith which is a supernatural gift of God (page xvii, The Reason for God). Or they may say it is because you have developed faith that your previous faith is false. They say that every doubt is caused by a leap of faith (page xvii, The Reason for God). A leap of faith is when you believe in something without proof or believe what is unprovable. Every religion says a leap of faith is necessary. But the problem is, you end up commanded to believe all the religion says in its official capacity. You will never be able to see if it is wrong. A religion that says it has the true faith and blames you for losing that faith is bigoted. If you have two religions, one believing the opposite of the other, both of them will maintain that it's your fault if you lose faith or change faith. A religion that is bigoted in the basic thing, faith, is bad in principle and you should depart from it for the sake of principle.
 
A religion claims to be a hospital for sinners and if it is not good in principle then it is no such thing.
 
If a religion says, "Believe in these things for God has revealed them" it is saying, "You are saying God is wrong if you don't believe." That is pressuring. While one might respect a faith that tries to avoid bias, one cannot respect one that tries to create one!
 
If man claims that it is an insult to God to doubt or hesitate when man offers you doctrines that supposedly originated with God but did not, then man is blaspheming and lying about God and demeaning your rights. You should not be in a religion that makes doubt to be a sin when that religion is man's creation not God's. That is a very foundational matter. You are empowering man by elevating his word as if it were God's. You are harassing and misleading those who you lead into the religion and those who you keep in it. Your worship of God is an insult to God if there is one. Such corruption will only get worse.

 

IS DOUBT AN INDIRECT ATTACK ON PEOPLE?

 

Religion sometimes says, "A skeptic who doubts too much too often by default will find people untrustworthy."  Perhaps but even then it does not have to.  It depends what field you doubt.  To doubt religion too often too much does not mean you will be suspicious of religionists all the time.  You may find them spurious as regards their religious beliefs and claims but okay with everything else.  Religion is merely trying to find a reason to make out doubt is harmful!!  It only succeeds in making itself look harmful!

 

IS FAITH THE ABSENCE OF DOUBT?

 

Christianity says that good is real and a power but evil is neither real or a power but just an abuse of good.  So evil is abused good. 

 

It says faith in God and his truth is good.  Note it does not say faith in itself is good.  It needs to be faith in the truth.

 

Religion says that to deliberately think what God may have revealed is wrong or merely manmade doctrine is a sin.  That is what it means by the sin of doubt.  It is deliberate uncertainty.

 

So we are talking about deliberate doubt.

Is faith a lack of wilful doubt or the absence of wilful doubt?  Doubt even if unintended still removes or endangers faith so is faith just a lack of doubt whether wilful or not?

If uncertainty is good as long as we try to do the right thing then we cannot degrade it by saying it is the absence of faith.  That implies it is a fault.  The best person does good to help a baby even if for some reason he is not sure if it is morally good.  Faith is a lack of doubt.  Doubt is the default or what is strictly necessary not faith.  If faith were a default then doubt could be described merely as a the lack of faith.  It cannot.

Doubt however is faith in its own way.  To doubt is to start to have faith that you can tell that your religion is wrong!   So doubt is really a form of faith that the religion does not like!

Faith in doctrine x is good if x is true.  But if doctrine x is false then this faith is bad.  So such bad faith is the absence of good faith! 

FAITH AND DOUBT GO TOGETHER?

If faith and doubt go together it does not follow that religious believers let themselves realise they doubt.  Such faith is like certainty.  It feels certain and acts certain.  Doubters are forbidden to doubt so that they might start to programme themselves to act and think as if they know what they say is true is in fact true.

FINALLY
 
Every religion is opposed to you finding out that it is wrong. It cares about what it wants to be best for you not what is best for you. Learn to think and think.

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