If you can be bothered reading what should have been a fairly short thread but ain't, get a snack and settle down for a rambling exploration of something or other about faith and the lack of it.<br /><br />The religious threads have encouraged me to start a thread exploring why some people have faith and pray and why other people turn away from them. <br /><br />Some people come to faith or have it strengthened through adversity. Some, like me, are perhaps turned away from it by adversity. Many have the good fortune just to absorb it in their family or community without ever having it really tested. I envy them the certainty and security it gives them.<br /><br />The real test of a lack of faith is in someone like me who had a strong religious upbringing but whose experience turned him away from prayer and religion and towards self-reliance, and who can face imminent death without resorting to prayer or trying make bargains with a god. <br /><br />That's not the same as saying I'm sure there isn't a god or an afterlife, but I'm unimpressed with the evidence for them on earth, which is the only place we're going to get it.<br /><br />At the general level I can't accept that a loving god would allow the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide or the KKK or slavery or the current massacres in Sudan or the execution for fornication of a Muslim woman who is the victim of rape or a few million other examples of gross injustice and harm to innocents.<br /><br />At the personal level, which probably confirmed my path to godlessness, by my 14th birthday I'd lost count of the times I thought I was about to die at the hands of my crazy drunken father. Three of many examples:<br /><br />1. If I hadn't moved off the arm of the arm chair the samurai sword that he swung at me and buried in the side of the chairback certainly would have killed me.<br /><br />2. His favourite trick was getting me in the military neck snapping hold and informing me that he could kill me with a quick shove because he was both a trained soldier and a doctor. A week when this didn't happen at least once was a quiet week. <br /><br />3. It's not widely recognised that you can train a 13 year old boy to stand to attention and then fall flat on his face rigidly at attention. I can assure you that it is possible to overcome the natural instinct to put your arms out to save yourself when you have had the crap beaten out of you often enough and have had a samurai sword swung at you as in the first example for flinching when about to hit the ground. I became quite proficient at falling to the ground at attention. It hurts, but you can learn to put up with most things. What hurts more is being used like a performing circus dog to amuse the drunken Catholic and army fu*kwits assembled for the performance, particularly when it is clear that some object but are too weak to voice their objection. <br /><br />This happy time of my life started when I was 12 after my first stepmother left with her (their) 5 kids and left me with the lunatic. By the time I was fourteen I'd long learnt it's pointless praying for help. <br /><br />It's also pointless asking anyone else for help, especially priests and Christian Brothers and sundry devout Catholics who will virtually run out of the house of a local prominent Catholic, no matter how patently dangerous he is, when they can't handle what is happening or what he is doing to a child. Begging and pleading and tugging at these useless bast@rds to stay or to help me or to take me with them was a waste of time. <br /><br />One of these pricks, a Jesuit priest, had the temerity to look critically at me repeatedly from the altar where he was celebrating my father's requiem mass a few weeks ago because I was standing there resolutely uninvolved in the mumbo jumbo service he was conducting. He didn't have the guts to make any adverse comment afterwards when he had the opportunity, which was just as well as I had the whole service to work out what I had to say to him about his deficiencies 40 odd years ago when he was one of the glorious examples of Catholicism and Christianity at its best who ran away when I sought his help on the many occasions he came to our house. I wasn't at the service out of any belief in it or love for my father but purely to support others in the family.<br /><br />I've had a few other times I thought I might die since I left home at 15, like car accidents and being trapped in a lift in a lift well full of diesel fuel with sparking electric wires and being trapped on the first storey of a building with a drugged idiot armed with a knife which he kept assuring me he was going to kill me with. In the latter case I was prepared to take a window out with my body and take my chances with the 15' drop onto concrete to get away, if I could just solve the immediate problem of getting out of my chair without being stabbed. I've never thought of prayer in any of these cases.<br /><br />The only times I've ever been tempted to pray in the 40+ years since I was 13 or 14 are for my children when it's been feared that they might have life-threatening illnesses. I didn't, but if they turned out to have the illnesses which fortunately they didn't I would have prayed to any god and sold my soul to the devil, if he thinks I have one, to save them. That doesn't mean I believe, just that I'd do whatever I could to save the people I love. <br /><br />As for me, although I make jocular comments about having a bet each way on my death bed by confessing (which is the Catholic way of collecting $100 and getting a "Get out of Jail Free" card), when it's been a real threat of my imminent death which is the best test, I have never thought of anything but doing whatever I had to do in a practical sense to live.<br /><br />But I never really believed any of the Catholic stuff even when I was an altar boy long before the real bad times hit. Otherwise I would have gone to mass on Sundays and done or not done lots of other things that condemned my soul to eternal damnation, although the Catholic Church in its infinite wisdom has since removed some of those things from the mandatory penalty scale, which must really pi$$ off the poor souls currently in hell because they stuffed up before the magic date. And people keep telling me that I'm wrong to believe that churches aren't controlled by men and not God!<br /><br />If it's the family that inspires belief by example, it didn't work for me despite relentless Catholic indoctrination at home and at school. I didn't rebel against it. I just thought it was BS, then and now.<br /><br />Maybe experience has little to do with faith or its absence? Maybe there is a faith gene or personality that some people can have or need faith in something outside themselves and others can't or don't need it?
A heavy chain smoker that had a severe heart attack!!! 
