Fish and Bread said:
For a young child, faith is usually about prayers that are akin to conversing with a friend, about singing fun songs to a loving God, and following very simple rules of ethicals (Don't lie, don't steal, don't hit your friends for no reason, help the poor, etc..). When one gets to be an adult, it gets to be a lot more complicated,
In the movie
"Dogma", there's a wonderful analogy comparing faith to a glass of water. When we're small, it doesn't take much faith to fill the glass. As we get older, the glass gets larger, and the same amount of faith won't fulfill us. Therefore, we periodically need to renew our faith in order to fill the glass.
If this analogy is correct, there's no way to simply go back. We have changed, and our faith needs to change to accommodate that.
Fish and Bread said:
and for many religion no longer brings joy and humility, but a sense of pain or of arrogance.
I don't see this as coming from religion. My mother is one of the most joyless and judgemental christians I know. Without religion, she would be a joyless and judgemental non-christian. She brings that attitude to christianity; christianity doesn't bring it to her.
Fish and Bread said:
It becomes about who is going to heaven and who is going to hell,
People are scared of the unknown. People want to know that death is something we don't have to fear. Therefore, there's a strong human need to understand what will happen to us after we die.
People also need to believe that they're right, which almost always leads them to believe other people are wrong.
Ultimately we should come to the realization that we don't have all the answers, we can't have all the answers, and we shouldn't waste our energy worrying about things that our outside of our control.
Of course, that's a lot more easily said then done, particularly the "not worrying" part. I struggle with it occasionally, and most people seem to worry
constantly about things they can't control.
Fish and Bread said:
whether or not we follow a lot of controversial rules about things like when and with whom and how to make love (and the effect thereof on our immortal souls),
I disagree with people on
both sides of this argument.
Why bring
souls into the discussion of sexuality? There are demonstratable
psychological consequences (to ourselves or others) for certain types of sexual behavior. There's a demonstrable impact to
the development of relationships based on when and how sex becomes a factor in the relationship.
My moral code became a lot more strict a little over a decade ago. I was "breaking" a lot of the "moral laws" of christianity, and I started to discover that most of them had
real consequences that I had been unable to predict.
Fish and Bread said:
Yet, oftentimes the God of our childhood seems to endorse many of the latter things
You can always go out and learn the hard way
why a lot of those rules exist. It's not the easiest way to go through life, but you will end up with a better answer than "Because god says so."
Fish and Bread said:
and if we find ourselves a new God, we lose the God we grew up with, if we can even make ourselves believe in another.
Or you can recognize that
your understanding of god was incomplete (and still is incomplete, and will probably always be incomplete). In that case, you're not losing god or changing gods. You're just getting to know god better.
Fish and Bread said:
I wonder if there's a path back to what we lost without compromising our traditions and what we believe to be the truth.
We mature, and things change.
There is no path back. However, there is a path
forward that we can follow that will allow us to retain much of the joy and wonder of youth without compromising the truth.
I won't promise that it's an easy path, though.