Hope

[DrNo]

Last month I told my dad about my doubts. This was pretty hard for me because I know his faith has been a big part of his grieving my mom's death two years ago and I did not know how he would react. My wife kind of forced my hand on this, but that's another story.

 

Anyway, this prompted an email discussion between him and me, and also a ministry team from his megachurch that "specializes" in explaining the difficult passages of the Bible. The emails have been respectful and I have been surprised at how easy it has been to poke holes in these "experts'" arguments.

 

He came to our house this weekend to watch our kids while the wife and I went house hunting. This was the first contact we had outside our emails. After we got back he and I watched a movie together like we normally would. Afterwards he initiated conversation about the emails. To my surprise he acknowledged that the passages I had pointed out were difficult to explain, and he did not think the team from his church was really answering any of the questions I raised very well. No, he is not deconverting, but he validated what I was experiencing.

 

He said he would continue to believe until science could definitively prove where life came from. I think he just needs to believe in an afterlife because of my mom. Anyway, he said that he still wanted to continue the emails. He is even reading material by Bart Ehrman and Ken Daniels. I doubt he will ever deconvert, but he is at least opening his mind. That is more than I have gotten from anyone else I have talked to.

[Guest MadameX]

Oh wow, interesting. I have had similar conversations with my mother. I really do not care if she deconverts; she gets a lot of comfort from her religion because, really, it is how she was raised. She is familiar with the rituals, it provides a sense of a community. But it is so interesting how she has explained away all the wacky parts of her belief. She has decided there is no hell after all, but something else that I couldn't quite follow when she explained it.

 

I think if you were raised with these pretty lies and go through life having believed what your trusted parents and family told you it is way too painful to come to any other conclusion, especially if you are expecting to be reunited with loved ones after death.

[Discern]

I think it's just better if some people cling to their faith in their later years. It's just too late to make a major change. My parents' whole life revolves around christianity and pastoring. If they had a crisis of faith, I really don't know what they'd do. They'd lose all their friends, have to stop pastoring and get a job, etc. All this in their senior years.

My grandmother has also been doing the church routine for decades. She's got plenty of christian books, reads her bible every day, and so on. Her whole lifestyle is so embedded that I don't think anyone could put a dent in it. Honestly I think there's an age limit for someone to deconvert....after most people hit a certain age it seems like there's no chance of change.

Or even if they could deconvert, you have to think will it make their life harder or easier? 

[owen652]

^exactly; thats why I don't bring up the subject with my parents. What's the point?