Quotes About Doubt

When we are taught that the Bible has to meet these unrealistic expectations for our faith to be genuine, the end product is a fragile, nervous faith.

But in resisting, we may actually be missing an invitation to take a sacred journey, where we let go of needing to be right and trust God regardless of what we feel we know or don't know.

But a faith that requires us to hold on to what we "know" becomes, we eventually discover, inadequate for handling the peaks and valleys of our humanity. It's also exhausting to try to hold it all together as it once was.

I am amazed and encouraged by those who have lived through these moments of hell on earth and have continued on in the life of faith anyway. They have something to teach people like me: no matter what we think we know, no matter how sure we happen to think we are, suffering is the place where our sense of certainty about God's ways fades like a dream and forces us to consider that what we know may not be as central to our faith as we might think.

Adjusting our understanding of God isn't a sign of weak faith, nor is it an attack on faith—it is faith.

Doubt is God's way of helping us not go there, though the road may be very hard and long.

When Christians feel crushed by such "people of God," faith is exposed as something that just doesn't work here and now. And if something doesn't work, intellectual arguments for staying in the faith lose their appeal over time. Why bother?

I doubt any system that won't reveal its purpose, that only offers promises of a better tomorrow.

Kelly was starting to have serious second thoughts about the whole assignment. Like all war correspondents, she supposed. Being on the ground was very different to sitting in the office anticipating being on the ground. Especially with the appearance of that red cloud.

That was the trouble with freethinkers, they had overactive imaginations that made them uncertain.

He'd learned long ago that logic and facts never meant anything to true believers—of anything.

Horst didn't believe in ghosts.

You're wrong," she said. "Both of you. If I know anything now, it's that our religions are lies. Horrid, dirty lies. I don't believe in God, or destiny, not any more.

I consider it extremely unlikely. Which I admit sounds like an agnostic answer rather than a definitive atheist assertion.

I can't trust the living," Loren told her.

Despite the evidence, that lost part of Jed's heart had wanted to believe in his divine savour and her promises of a better world.

Because anything that has to use the Cat to make it work can't be right. It just can't.

I haven't chosen to make an issue of faith.

Hay que introducir tensión entre la expectativa y la incertidumbre.

The problem with anger against God is that it's impossible to go higher in the system to complain.

I can't imagine that anything like the Christian image of hell actually exists. But lately I've been wondering about the ancient Greenlandic realm of the dead. If you consider all the unpleasantness you encounter while you're alive, it seems improbable that it would all come to an end simply because you're dead.

I'll come, you'll see,' I said. I knew it was a lie, she knew it, too.

I have lost the sense of how to tackle a believing European.

If you consider all the unpleasantness you encounter while you're alive, it seems improbable that it would all come to an end simply because you're dead.