Believe in Your Doubt

How doubt is so natural its value exceeds belief

The founders knew the power of doubt and hedged the stupor of faith with some clever cautions. Now, doubt is considered a trial to mature you in the faith, “there will be doubters and temptations, but god will reward you for your faith”—Just believe, god is testing your devotion.

Using your good sense to forfeit your good sense makes no sense. It puts one in the position of “we believe” and everyone is smarter when they join a group, right? My son used to always say, “no one is as dumb as all of us“.

If you fear the unavoidable unknowns that bookend this existence, by all means join a group to influence you to prejudice. Now you are in a position to believe great and abominable things by the power of groupthink. Now, go ahead, condemn and judge at will, hope them wickeds to suffer and burn, for the power and backing of the group has now made you something you’re not.

The reality—doubt is a warning to your inner self that your being conned. It’s a natural feeling to protect ourselves, but has been carefully crafted into a weakness by religious men of words who have a dog in the fight. Doubt is a weakness? Only if you need to believe.

To those who want to protect their minds from assimilating imaginations, doubt is an essential strength. Never give up your power to speak out. Ignoring doubt produces exactly the conundrum that allows nonsense to flourish. Quelling your openness to question everything—by fear of rejection.

“Any group that will embrace you over belief, will abandon you over unbelief” Conditional friendships anyone?

Author: jimoeba

Alternatives to big box religions and dogmas

62 thoughts on “Believe in Your Doubt”

  1. Always seemed to me a negation of the human mind that religion not only sees “faith”, belief with no evidence, as a virtue, but in fact has convinced people that the stronger their belief in the face of weak evidence, the more they will be rewarded by their imaginary friend. Outside religion, people who strongly believe in things for which there is no evidence receive psychiatric treatment.

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    1. Certainty. I’ve touched on this before how faith is such an honored trait but it takes no effort, academic, or discipline to believe. It holds no fact or value, but is merely a thought conviction of the imagination to pacify doubts.

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  2. Don’t mind me if I doubt your existence, Jim. I think you are but a figment of Word Press conspiracy theories to undermine the existence of the Vogons! Theyll be putting a space highway through our Solar system in about 29.276 centuries.

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  3. Ya know, if you do enough speed balls ( morphine and meth ) it’ll make you as fucked up as Jehovah. No shit. King of the universe. Lift a car with one hand, easy. Mood swings in a heartbeat. You don’t know whether to stand up or sit down and all you do is talk shit and see imaginary stuff squirreling around. Just like in the Bible. It’s uncanny.

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    3. Ha ha. I imagine there is an upper limit to the amount of speedballs you can take. Likely ending in demise. But, to quote the famous mustachio’d German, ‘God is dead’. So I kinda agree with you.

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  7. So true, Jim. Doubt is a survival trait, when it comes right down to it. Doubt is absolutely necessary for one’s survival and welfare. Doubt, logical thinking, curiosity, evidence, investigation – these are the things that enabled us to become more than simple hunter-gatherers wandering the plains of Africa. Yet all of these things that make us human beings must be completely suspended, even discarded, when it comes to religion? No. Religion should be subjected to the same scrutiny as everything else in our environment, and we should be demanding that religions present the same level of proof we require for any other claim.

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    1. Until people realize there is nothing outside themselves to achieve, that this conscious experience is the answer, doubt will not prevail. The mystery is there is no mystery, but identifying self as separate from the universe creates distance and distraction from the oneness we seek with the universe. That bridge cannot be gapped when one is in deception of his true nature.

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  9. I like the part about praying for skeptics, doubters, questioners, thinkers, etc. May god remove their ability to think because it causes them to question and wonder if something is real, truth, or in our best interest.
    Why did god make me like this? Did he not know we might use those abilities he gave us?
    “It’s okay, this is a test of your belief system. Not to worry. It’s only a test.”

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    1. You’d think religion should be fun, but it’s all so serious. It was never meant to be serious. Life is to celebrate this short little vacation to the material world, but it’s been turned into an entrance exam with a timer.

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      1. Yes. To live the best life I am able for as long as possible. What would it be like if all humans worked cooperatively to make the world a better place and this life worth living. But no. We have to have heaven, hell, and the 72 virgins bull shit, along with the mind control test.

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          2. They believed? Mary was a hooker for the “Holy Spirit” but got pregnant so they had to quickly make up a story about that. Does heaven clone more virgins once the dead earth ones are used up? What happens when they run out? What happens to those no longer virgins, they get handed out to the Christians? What happens to those men who were sure they’d qualify for their virgin quota and fail, do they at least get to watch? So many questions left and the movie is about to end, I can already hear Porky go, “That’s all folks!” and you wonder if you wasted both your time and money.

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      1. That god will remove our free will to choose and we can become one of them.
        And we can pray that god does the same for them, so they can become one of us. Fair enough. Right?

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    1. It takes a really good meeting to beat no meeting at all. I heard this before the advent of memes, but looks like a Mormon thing, doesn’t it?

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  13. Good stuff, Jim. Doubt is a strength, a normal response of inquiry. But religion discourages inquiry. To them, inquisitiveness grows like a cancer and, therefore, discourages such hollow belief “systems” as religion which, as we all know, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

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  15. Doubt is one of the biggest issues I have with religion. It’s right up there with logical absurdities and outright lies from the church.

    If the story is true, then doubt should not exist. My next post is going to also be about doubt because it is an important subject to bring up when discussing topics like this. So many times churches will dismiss doubts or try to talk their way around it. I’ve seen church signs that say “Have doubt? Come on in and we’ll talk about it.” Well, of course they’ll talk about it so they can put their spin on it and never address the big issue: If God exists, why does doubt? If Jesus died and rose again and that is a fact, why does doubt exist?

    Doubt is a red flag our minds use to warn us. It’s like pain. Pain is our body’s way of telling us there is something wrong. Doubt is like that but for our minds. And believe me, religion and doubt have caused me much brain pain over the years.

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      1. I doubted when I was a Christian because I wanted to believe, but the story didn’t add up. I no longer believe in the story, so doubt doesn’t factor in any longer. I cannot be certain with regards to the existence of a god, but I don’t concern myself with that because convincing me of the existence is the responsibility of the god, not me. I have to work with what is available to me and, like I said, the story doesn’t add up.

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  16. powerful! your son is very bright. there is great danger in all groups. just by identifying with one particular thing/idea, you already separated yourself from the whole. and feed off each other’s blindness. our non-dualistic friend, Alan Watts, would turn in his ‘no-one’s grave’.

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  17. There’s so much truth to this! Wonderful post.
    I’ve been learning some philosophy at Uni and the intricacies of science, and one thing we are taught is that science works best when you think of “truth” in science not as truth but facts that may yet be disproved and replaced. So scientists are always trying to make science fail. They always doubt what they know. They’re always looking for more or to replace existing theories if need be. The core of intelligence and scientific progress lies with the DOUBT of existing paradigms and constantly looking for improvements.
    That is how humans need to live their lives. Rather than just sitting idle and giving some rich bozo all their money and obedience. What a waste.

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    1. The apologist frequently states, “science is proven wrong all the time”. Sure, then it’s improved; not stuck in an archaic book from a violent time. Has a religious teaching ever supplanted a scientific principle? Has ever a scientific breakthrough started on a biblical truth? No, and no! But god has gotten smaller and smaller, even in my lifetime. God used to own the mountains and people feared them. Now they are fields of study.

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      1. You’re right, god is getting smaller. Once upon a time he owned the cattle on a thousand hills. What does he own now? A rusty old Subaru with a bumper sticker that says, “Jesus Saves”? He certainly doesn’t own the properties the religions who claim him as god, possess.

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        1. Oh I got you! Hope that didn’t get lost in the diatribe. Absolutely Popper and the demand for falsifiability is a wonderful approach.

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            1. Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Maybe college taught me how to learn. My motto seems to be “anything worth doing is worth doing the hard way”, but thank you.

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  18. I find this post interesting!

    You Stated — “The reality—doubt is a warning to your inner self that your being conned.”

    My Response — Since we both know atheist also have doubts then your statement becomes curious.

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    1. “Atheism in the informal sense is a profoundly religious attitude. An attitude in life of total trust of letting go. When we form images of god they are all really exhibitions of our lack of faith—something to hold on to, something to grasp”—Alan Watts
      I do not doubt that I was born and I will die. That decision, made by nature takes the ball out of my court. There is no amount of fear or belief that can change that. I do not doubt what I never knew before I was told. But certainly doubt is a necessary feature of survival.

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