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Desrtopa comments on Recent de-convert saturated by religious community; advice? - Less Wrong Discussion
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You might try telling them that you're trying to follow up a case of genuine curiosity, the sort they never condemned when it didn't touch on matters of faith, and it hurts you to feel that you're being discouraged from being intellectually honest. If God wants you to believe, he can do it by placing the evidence you're looking for before you, rather than preventing you from carrying out an unbiased investigation.
I've done this with a few. The response has been varied. I think my wife understood that. I had another friend basically tell me I was obligate to "have faith seeking understanding" because I was the one who defected and that I owed it to my wife.
I still have an incredibly hard time seeing as how that's proper.
Indeed. Many initially object to this idea because they think it fiddles with free will, but if god is the author of all events and permits everything to happen according to his will and has all knowledge... he already knew what would cause any given person to believe and necessarily allowed that evidence to come before them. I think of people as having a "threshold of belief" and think they are blind to where it lies. Some unpredicted thing comes along one day, breaks the threshold, and you change your mind.
If you can go along with that model as useful, then it could be said that god knows where my threshold is and isn't meeting it.
Have you tried asking if you were, say, a Muslim, if it would still be right for you to have faith seeking understanding? Does your friend think this is always the right thing to do, or just when you happen to start out believing the right thing?
If God can't alter events that will affect our decisions, can he actually do anything in the real world?
Free will has always been one of the most frustrating arguments for me to deal with, because it's subject to such an extent of doublethink. It appears that God is capable of everything, except when he's incapable of anything. It's extraordinarily difficult to get people to notice that they should be confused by this.
In theory, I think he'd actually say that this is always the right thing to do if you are pre-committed in various ways to a life based on X and which affects close relationships.
In practice, I think he'd welcome me with open arms if I was a Muslim/Jew/Scientologist/Mormon and told him I was having doubts and wanted to seriously consider Catholicism as the one true faith.
Great point.
Another great point. I played praise and worship at a friend's wedding last summer as a non-believer (he asked and I wasn't going to say no), and one of the songs was this one(I linked to the chorus), which has this refrain:
Having that in my head for so long to practice it and what not, I came up with a re-write that illustrates your point: