God for INTP's

I remember deciding that I didn't believe in God at about age 5. Then, when I learned to read better, and got a friend whose family was very christian - I don't know what denomination, but they were the only people I had ever heard actually talk about God like he existed - I started looking at the books on our shelves at home and decided to read the bible. It was an illustrated, shortened version, I believe, but I decided that I would believe in God and pray and follow the 10 commandments and everything. This was when I was seven or eight.

A year later I started researching paganism and Wicca and decided I liked Wicca much better than Christianity, so I converted. I think I kept at it for a year or two before discarding religion as a waste of time - converting from believing in no god to believing in one god to believing in many was very easy. Too easy. And that's when I quit religion.

I'm an apatheist now (don't care whether there are gods or not, there are many more interesting questions), or at least that's what I keep tellng myself. Really, I'm an atheist.

saturnne said:

Hello lovely people,

Does anyone on this forum believe in God? I am curious.

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Yes, I strongly used to abt 5yrs ago but not now.:happy:

Hello lovely people,

I found God very recently and this is very new to me

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Really ??? I have been looking for him too. Where exactly did u find him. NYC?:mellow:

Hello lovely people,

But for some reason, I feel like He was in me and with me my whole life. I am so grateful that I've finally found Him. My God is all-loving, comforting, and knows everything about me. He calms me down when I'm being carried away by dark assumptions or misleading thoughts, and He always has His arm around me. Although this is very personal, I want to share it here...

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GOod for U.

After my introverted thinking started running wild, i have been more sceptical of religion as a whole. For now a prefer to view and analyse things objectively without any favors or fears.
U can call me an atheist for now:happy:.

Once i am able to convince myself, i might also be able to see what u see and fell what u 'r feeling now.
but for now, I AM AN ATHEIST FOR LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:laughing:.

leesh said:

Not necessarily to try to steer you any which way, but just FYI-- faith is like a muscle. You choose to believe, and the more you flex it, the easier it is and the more it makes sense.

Also, to quell one misconception, you *can* have faith and still value logic and Science.

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From your post, it seems to me that as time passes having faith feels more comfrtable. But how exactly does it make more sense? I just read the definition of faith online: belief without evidence. Perhaps it is not evidence that is making faith stronger in you. Maybe your philosophy of faith is deepening?

I can understand how you can fit science into religion. "Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame" - Albert Einstein. Not that Einstein inspired me, I just think it's a great quote for this forum. Anyway, the problem INTPs have with faith in religion is that they, including me, find contradictions in scripture, philosophy (free will) and for others science. At least there are contridictions in our understanding of logic.
But our idea of logic can change as history as shown. One example is the shape of the Earth. It seemed logical that the shape of the Earth was flat at one point until more data was reeled in. This and other discovered phemonon evolved how we logically compute the external world: in general terms, illusions blinds us from the truth. Such is the case for God, maybe it's an illusion?
I don't know if God's an illusion. Maybe our notion of logic will evolve to a point where the universe will only be understood if God was behind it all. What amazes me is that some people are so certain that God exists- almost as if they expereinced him/her. I knew a very intelligent man in college who claimed to have done so. What makes you confident that God exists? I am not trying to get in your face with this response; you just seem like the appropriate person with these questions of mine. I look forward to your response.

tl;dr: Spiritual but not religious. Agnostic atheist.

I used to believe in God, and was actually quite religious for about two years (second to fourth grade), up until the fifth grade. Because my parents were religious and instilled Christianity into me at a young age, for a while I followed it and complied without question.

Before the second grade, I did not really believe in God, and I thought no one else did, either. I just thought everyone was acting because this was the norm. I played along because what kid doesn't want to fit in?

When I moved in second grade, I started attending a new church. The people there were charismatic and very kind; I warmed up to them quickly. I became immersed in my Bible study classes, partly because of the people and partly because I found the Bible itself fascinating. Soon, I actually started believing in it. Before I knew it, I was praying thirty minutes every night and before every meal; my parents would find me in the living room at random times perusing the Bible.

However, the more I read the news and learned about history, the more I became filled with doubt. How could I know that Christianity was the way to go, and not the hundreds of other religions in the world? Did people really expect me to lead my life according to a book that had been compiled by dozens of different men thousands of years ago, which was then translated hundreds of times? If so, what version of that book was I supposed to trust? How come it seemed to condone so many questionable things, such as stoning, sexism, homophobia and slavery?

As I started using the Internet in the fourth grade and accessing related content, I quickly began to lose my faith. From the fifth grade until the tenth, I actually believed that there was absolutely nothing but the physical: we are just machines, ruled by the chemicals in our brains, that will cease to exist completely once our bodies stop working. In the tenth grade, I felt a bit incredulous that something as complex as living creatures (including plants and other animals), with such strong willpower and emotions, could be simplified into mere "objects that breathed and moved" (that, at least, was how I saw us before…like robots).

Still, I did not trust any organized religion, and I scoffed at the idea of abiding by any kind of religious text. Being Asian-American and bilingual, I knew how much can, and will, be lost when translating from one language to another. It's not hard to believe that as much as 90% of the original meaning can be lost when something is translated hundreds of times, especially no set, uniform standard was present. And the church seemed like such a scam to me. Organizing a hierarchy, building huge elaborate buildings, trying to reinforce seemingly irrelevant (and, quite frankly, unimportant rules)-- couldn't that time and effort have been used to actually be Christ-like, and help those in need? Throughout history it seems like the church has always been a tool to manipulate, used as an excuse to carry out ridiculous inhumane deeds.

Now I just graduated high school and am about to become a college freshman. Currently, I would describe myself as spiritual, but not religious; for the sake of labels I call myself an agnostic atheist. I do not believe that any single religion in the world has captured the truth when it comes to the afterlife, why we are here, what brought us here, etc. Much like many Christians tell me that I, as a mere human, cannot comprehend God, neither do I believe that anyone on Earth can present such truths about life simply because I think those truths will be beyond the human mind. I do believe that the energy from living creatures will somehow remain after their bodies die, but that is all I'm (relatively) convinced on. And yes, despite the way I may come off in this post, I still do respect religious people (well, the respectable, sane ones)-- I simply don't understand this particular aspect of them.

Ingenue said:

I think that being a Christian and an INTP would be quite unusual, as to be a true Christian requires that "leap of faith" that would probably not sit well with a prototypical INTP. Still, I am curious to understand how INTPs who do consider themselves Christian resolve this seeming gap.

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I'll take a crack at it as a very devout Catholic revert. I'm just going to describe my own experience. I fell away from religion in my early teen years and echoed most of the thoughts I see here from INTPs. However, I still believed in God (theistic agnostic) and I figured if I was going to follow some form of morality then liberal Christianity had it pretty good. I go (went) to a Christian summer camp each year and last year I had an experience. It's a personal thing I don't really want to describe. I fell in line with evangelicalism after God reveled himself to me. However as you say, leaps of faith often don't jibe well with INTPs and anecdotal evidence from just myself was hardly enough proof. Regardless I slowly fell away since I was having some problems after reading some atheist arguments. Yet last winter when I was searching for information on sola scriptura I came across a Catholic website with lots of apologetics materials. Through historical proofs I came to terms with Christianity from an intellectual perspective, followed by Catholicism. Over the last 6 months I found that most atheist arguments against Christianity are tailored toward the Protestant perspective being that its the most popular in the United States. Many of the arguments did not have merit against Catholicism or for that matter Orthodoxy. Finally I saw the papal encyclical fides et ratio from John Paul II, and I was hooked. :laughing:

Basically, I believe in God because I cannot logically not believe in God. I believe in Christianity because the Christian God is perfectly logical and can account for the universe as we see it, along with historical evidence about the resurrection, and finally I'm a Catholic because to me its the only thing that makes sense if you objectively look at historical Christianity (no offense to protestants)