How do you reconcile discrepancies between reason and faith? When has reason failed you? What do you believe strictly on faith? Does every question have an answer?Oh boy. This is a really big question, and it's one that I would struggle with on even a normal day, but today especially I find this difficult. My mental energy is pretty low today, but I'll see what I can do with this.
So. How do you reconcile discrepancies between reason and faith? Hmmm. Well. First I think I should start with what I believe. I don't believe in any certain "faith"...or, I should say, organized religion, which is usually what people imagine when then think of faith. What I believe in is a god (some sort of higher power). I don't believe we can every really know what this god is and what it wants from us. But I do believe there is some sort of connecting power, connecting us all. It sounds silly when I type it out, because I am a person who likes to have reasoning for everything, and I don't really have much of a reason for my faith.
But anyway, I should continue first with what I actually believe. Anyway, so there's this higher power. I called it God for lack of a better term, or for convenience sake, i don't know. Anyway, it's almost like this great life force. I'm having trouble describing it right now because of my mental state. I'm so defeated and utterly mentally exhausted, so I don't feel the spiritual connection right now. Plus, my current environment isn't one that makes that connection easy. You see, one of the reasons that I believe in this higher power is that, in certain environments, I can almost feel it's presence. Being out in nature is especially conducive to this. Sunshine and warmer temperatures. I feel like I'm rambling. Sorry.
So there's some sort of higher power that I can't really describe. There's also an afterlife, which I can describe a lot better, I feel. I believe in a heaven, although maybe not the Christian version of heaven. Basically just...your soul lives on after you've died, and you'll meet the souls of the loved ones who've died before you, kind of like the traditional view of heaven I guess. I feel like those who have passed on can have a sort of small influence in the lives of their still living loved ones...they become guardian angels, almost. Watching over those they loved, ya know? Anyway. I DON'T believe in hell. The idea that someone who has committed a bad act in their short life (which, though it seems long to us, even a lifetime of bad deeds is really a very small sliver of time when we're talking about where your soul will be for the rest of eternity) will have to spend the rest of eternity in torment is just not something I can believe. Maybe there's some sort of purgatory or something where your soul will go until you have fully felt the consequences of what you've done, and repented for it. Maybe you have to make amends somehow. I don't know. But eventually, your soul will be pure again and you can go to heaven.
As you can see, my beliefs are not concrete at all. I'm not even 100% what I believe. But there you have it.
So, how do I reconcile discrepancies between reason and faith? Well...I'm not sure. For me, it's always been more about listening to how I felt. And like I said, I can feel the presence of a higher power. I can feel the presence of my guardian angels. I just...FEEL it. It doesn't HAVE to be reasonable for me to believe it. If I were to try to enforce my beliefs on others, well, THEN it would need to be reasonable. But so long as my beliefs aren't harming anyone, I think it's ok to go by what I feel rather than scientific proof or lack thereof. Just because you can't prove something is true doesn't necessarily mean it's not true. Maybe it is true and you just can't prove it. And that's how I feel about God. I feel like it's true, but there is absolutely no way for us to prove that god does or does not exist (Science and God, as I see god, can co-exist).
Does every question have an answer?
I feel like there is an answer to every question, but there are lots of questions that we don't have, and maybe never will have, the means to find the answer. So basically, the universe knows the answer to every question. The universe, the higher power, an energy field, I don't know how to describe it. But somewhere an answer exists, but if we don't know the answer, it's because we haven't figured out how to get the answer, and it's possible that we never will. Like I said early, the question of whether or not god exists. There is definitely an answer to that, but we will probably never know for sure. I don't know...I'm really bad at explaining myself. And I feel like this is getting crazily abstract and metaphysical and weird.
I'm going to leave it there for now. I know I didn't actually answer all the questions (though really, can I ever TRULY completely answer ANY of these questions?) but I'm just beat and so I'll come back to it later maybe.
-Beth
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