Nuggets from Seeking and Finding God—A Call to Re-examine Your Faith

Unquestionably, there is nothing more important than having an impeccably factual and rational basis for one’s faith. To the many who think of faith as a belief strongly held and without evidence to support it (and often even in spite of much evidence to the contrary), that may seem an outrageous statement. Logically, however, if believing something strongly doesn’t make it so (as human experience daily proves), then it is the greatest folly to continue on with a “faith” that has no basis in fact but merely in fancy—and must therefore inevitably prove to be empty. The cost could be eternal and irrecoverable.

That being the case, how much better it is to “lose” one’s faith now while there is still time to discover the truth, than to find out too late that one has been following a lie. Such disillusionment often follows when a young person matures, leaves homes to work or attend university or enter the armed services, and is no longer under parental and church influence. This could be the case whether one were a Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or an adherent of any other religion.

The same holds true for someone who has claimed to be a Christian but has no personal relationship with Christ on His terms. That there are millions of such people is evident from the answers given on various religious polls.

Many a young person raised in a Christian home, having professed faith in Christ, and having long attended and even been active in a good evangelical church, has later rejected Christ on the basis of peer pressure, or a little “higher education,” or out of necessity to justify a godless lifestyle. This turning away from one’s professed faith is often justified with the claim that there is no truth, but that we have all, no matter what the religion, simply been conditioned to believe what we believe.

Since the days of Freud, psychology has long promoted the theory that any religious faith is merely a conditioned response learned especially in youth. That may well be true in many cases, but it cannot serve as justification for abandoning what one has been taught from childhood. The issue is whether what one was persuaded to believe is the truth or not. Tragically, the truth has often been abandoned for a more appealing lie.

In fact, this idea of conditioning is a myth that must be dispensed with in our search for true faith. The very fact that the person has rebelled against his upbringing and alleged conditioning is itself proof that this theory is false. That multitudes of formerly religious persons offer what they consider to be sound reasons for rejecting what they have been taught and once believed proves that the so-called conditioning upon which this theory rests didn’t work, at least not in their cases. The very rebellion the theory has been adopted to excuse disproves the conditioning theory.