Which Best Describes Your Beliefs?
Webster’s Dictionary
Spiritualism: The belief or doctrine that the spirits of the dead, surviving after the moral life, can and do communicate with the living, esp. through a person (a medium) particularly susceptible to their influence.
Religion: A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a super human agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
Agnostic: A person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.
Atheist: A person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.
We hope the videos below will open your heart to the possibility of eternal life. Both videos are of true life stories.
Does Our Religious Beliefs Change As We Age?
Do you consider yourself Religious, Spiritual, Agnostic or Atheist? Everyone has their own opinion about God, or the lack of God in their lives. Very religious families have Atheist within them, separating themselves from the herd. Why does God touch of some of us, but not all of us? Are our hearts simply not open to God and what He offers, or is God a myth that some of us cling to for support and comfort in a very chaotic and troubling world?
When faced with a crisis, some of the most religious loose their faith in God, believing that God has deserted them. But has God really deserted us? Or are we simply experiencing life (the good and bad) as God intended us to experience to purify our souls? Earth has been described as hell by some and as boot camp for our souls by others. How we survive life’s challenges is rooted in how we perceive God and His love for us.
What is fascinating is the drastic differences of who and what God is by the religious. Which religion is correct? Or are any of the documented religions correct in their beliefs? Have we all gotten it wrong? Some believe God is really a green Martian and Earth is a scientific project for their amusement. How has our idea of religion changed over the years? With age comes wisdom, so now that we’re 50 and over, how has wisdom effected our belief systems?
What faith is not * Sister Joan Chittister
Uncommon Gratitude
Faith is not about understanding the ways of God. It is not about maneuvering God into a position of human subjugation, making a God who is a benign deity who exists to see life as we do. Faith, in fact, is not about understanding at all. It is about awe in the face of the God of all. And it is awe that inspires an alleluia to the human soul.
Faith is about reverencing precisely what we do not understand—the mystery of the Life Force that generates life for us all. It is about grounding ourselves in a universe so intelligent, so logical, so clearly loving that only a God in love with life could possibly account for it completely.
When we center our power outside ourselves, which is of the essence of faith, we have faith in something greater than our smallness. We take our very lack of control as a sign of God’s presence in the world. It is precisely because of our smallness that we can come to see and trust the greatness of God that surrounds us. It is only then that we can really come to see the face of God in the face of the other.
Faith in what we cannot control, do not see, cannot understand destroys the idol that is ourselves. It is only the deep-down belief that we are not the be-all and end-all of the universe that can save us from ourselves. It is the awareness of being part of something vast and intelligent and well-intentioned that gives purpose to life, that leads us to seek beyond the horizons of our smallness to the hope that tomorrow, warped as we may be today, we can all be better.
Faith in God is the only ground we have for faith in ourselves, in humanity, in life. Then we may care enough about others, about the purpose of God for all human life, to go beyond the kind of religion that turns God into a local deity and life into a zero-sum game in which winner takes all and losers abound.
—from Uncommon Gratitude
by Joan Chittister (Liturgical Press)
