Religious
Miracles in the Production and Destruction of Faith In basic religion classes, students are told that as Catholics, they need to have a faith in God and that their faith may not seem reasonable at times. As the students get older, they are told that in order to strengthen their faith, doubts, and working through these doubts, are an expected part of their lives while miracles may strengthen their growing beliefs. To further complicate the matter, students are taught that too many doubts can bring about a loss of faith, as can doubts from these same miracles. In John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving discusses this balance between healthy doubts bringing about faith and too many doubts eroding faith.
Through these perspectives, Whitmarsh emphasizes the significance of atheism in classical history, with a clear intention of opposing the frequent neglect atheists and atheist history receive from influential historians and educators. To this end, Whitmarsh aims to disprove the misconception that religion is inherently natural in humans, thus recognizing and acknowledging atheist history as equally significant to religious history. Such a platform is consistent
In conclusion, in the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel utilizes the suffering and adversity of Jews during the Holocaust in order to present how when faith in God is lost, a person can continue to progress in life or not, but they will only be able to if they have hope and faith in themselves. The book illustrates that without God, one must still be able to live a satiated life and be able to procure self-motivation. In the lives of Jews during the Holocaust, as well as people today, no matter what religion one has faith in, when faith in that is lost due to hardships, one must be able to find hope in other places. This is not to say that following a religion is useless, but instead to relay the message that in addition to faith in something else,
Faith is a significant part of one’s daily life. Everyone endures moments in their life in which situations challenge one’s religious beliefs. In Elie Wiesel’s short novel he bears an immense amount of hardships throughout the Holocaust that test his religious faith. As a young adult, Elie was just beginning to venture into his religious beliefs discovering his personal values and faith; but as he began that journey the German soldiers infiltrated his village. His whole village was soon transported to Auschwitz and divided up between camps.
The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel tells a compelling story that engages the reader to be on the tip of their seats. Some argue that there is no true realtiy but some think there is. Faith can be interpreted in several ways. Faith is to believe without proof and to be humble of the heart, mind and soul. People attend church; that is something a person decides for themselves or if they are quite religious.
The Air War was a pivotal turning point in the Conflict in Europe, as the Allied success in gaining air superiority facilitated the support needed for crucial operations such as the D-Day landing at Normandy. It occurred during 1939-1945, notably shaping the trajectory of the conflict, catalysed by the collapse of France, where Britain found itself at serious risk of a German invasion. The Allied success in the Battle of Britain (BOB) was a significant turning point because the shift in German tactics and technological advances of Britain prevented a German invasion. The ‘Blitz’ was a relative turning point of the Conflict in Europe because the resistance of Britain represented a psychological victory that strengthened morale on the homefront.
Unfortunately, for most people, faith is there to protect them from evil and guide them with a plan, but it may not always be that way. The fact that one can change their view on their god is very surprising. However, in Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, Wiesel loses his faith and starts to question his God about the Holocaust. Although many people stay strong in
Faith is often thought of as simply believing in a religion or deity, but in the dictionary, faith is defined as complete trust in someone or something by. This definition of faith is shown in the works of Eliezer Wiesel, Markus Zusak, Alexander Kimel, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In Night, Wiesel portrays his struggle with his faith in God during the Holocaust. Throughout The Book Thief, Zusak shows the faith which his characters, Liesel and Max, have in the Hubermanns. Kimel writes about his faith in God as a Jewish Holocaust survivor in “The Creed of a Holocaust Survivor,” and Roosevelt speaks about America’s faith in God and their soldiers during the D-Day attacks during World War II in his well-known “D-Day Prayer.”
In his essay "The Will to Believe" William James tells us that his purpose is to present "a justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced." Page2. I found his arguments also persuasive because he suggests the existence of God cannot be solve by our intellectual means. James argues that intellectual activity is motivated by two goals: to shun error and believe truth. The choice to believe or not is alive, forced and momentous.
A common questioning of a higher power beyond the physical realm lingers in society: Who and what is God?. However, many of these theological questions cannot be answered until we, of course, die. Due to human’s innate curiosity to understand the forces beyond their own, especially in terms of religion, humans find their own reasons to believe in God in the process of discovery. Religion is a sense of belief and worship to praise a higher power (God), and it provides a guide for human beings to have the opportunity to come together and live as one image of God’s children. “Imagine There’s No Heaven” is an article in which Salman Rushdie, the author, presents an atheistic view where religion is pointless, and a higher being is non-existent.
Rational humans, equipped with faith, can assess that they are partly embodied in the sensible world while still connected to the ideal intelligible world. It is with this that we can work toward enjoying the sensible world while remaining unattached as to transcend to the intelligible world and closer to unity with God. Humankinds other choice is to use free will to chase temporary physical goods in the sensible world and live a life of anxiety and suffering as you attempt to find the unity in the form of love in the particulars, that can only be found with God. Humans also have limitations in what they can do in the form of their rational minds. Although their rational mind can help them realize that they are still connected to the intelligible world, this can only be seen with faith in God.
Paul Tillich was an American theologian and philosopher who born on August 20, 1886, in Starzeddel, Brandenburg, Germany. Tillich was a deep thinker and very compassionate where faith was concerned, and he used different avenues to describe faith and belief to grasp the attention of readers, other theologians, and believers of faith. According to author Wendy Morrison from the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, Tillich's understanding of faith differs from the common understanding of faith, as he relayed that message in Dynamics of Faith, where he states that there is hardly a word in the religious language, both theological and popular, that is subject to more understandings, distortions and questionable definitions than the word "faith" (Morrison, 2011).
The human mind’s ability and innate desire to justify and explain the world and its phenomena has led to some of the most significant and world-altering discoveries and inventions, illustrated throughout the renaissance, enlightenment, scientific revolution, and industrial revolution. Logical pursuits comprise a significant capstone of human nature and progress. However, according to Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy, these tendencies have created different dimensions of religion; the rational and non-rational, with the latter often times overlooked. The most significant difference between the rational and non-rational aspects of religion deal with their respective emphasis on reason and feeling. Rudolph Otto prioritizes the non-rational as offering a truer understanding of religion because he claims the core of all religious life revolves around experiences and feeling, not simply rational thought.
This paper will touch upon these points and will demonstrate that the atheistic outlook can most certainly contain hope and consolation, simply in different ways than that of theological outlooks. Richard Dawkins contributes to this argument with a scientific and logical perspective on the idea of hope and consolation within the atheistic outlook. In order to argue against and disprove the statement that the atheistic outlook provides no consolation or hope, Dawkins seeks to also criticize and disprove the ironic reasons that believers claim to have hope and consolation. The first point Dawkins makes to this concept of consolation is “religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true.” Many believers make the claim that God is a psychological factor wired into the human brain, religion and God is a psychological necessity for the human brain and is emotionally essential for humans to function happily.
