Has Your Opinion About God Been Affected by Your Suffering?

[LostGirl]

Well, I think if it weren't for God I'd already be dead. At the same time I don't understand why I was born to live the life I have. I think spirituality is an issue we each have to deal with on our own, and come to terms with how if affects our lives.

 

[cookie]

marlene--agreed.
cathy

 

[Nicolette]

Hi....I'm watching this thread as religion is a touchy subject at the best of times. Please remember to respect others rights to their views and opinions thanks and keep on topic.

This thread is not about differing religious views, the question is "has your opinion about God been affected by your suffering" and is not about your opinion of others.

thanks

 

[Seychelle]

The trauma events started when I was a baby and continued through childhood, so I don't really have a before and after PTSD to write about. However, I do have a before and after understanding of the trauma so I will write about that.

I've been an atheist since I was 9 or 10 or around about then. I'm still an atheist. However, I was an angry and intolerant atheist up until a couple of years ago. Now I'm much more calm and accepting of others beliefs.

I can now see that my anger and intolerance of religion, in particular Christianity, was because of the sexual assaults perpetrated by a relative who was a respected elder in his church. The anger I had towards him wasn't concious but was directed towards religion instead of directly at him. Once I became concious of this and directed my anger towards him, and separated religion from the sexual assaults, my anger and intolerance towards religion dropped significantly (it hasn't completely gone, but I don't act on it any more).

 

[Mercy]

Dear Void,
I had all the same questions as you and more. I couldn't understand a God that would kill his son, granted Jesus went to his death voluntarily. I was brought up un a New England wasp context which was very much against women. I don't think there is another place in the US that ever burned women as witches. Imagine what effect that had on their daughters down the generations.

The form of hatred and maybe fear of women that came down to me was, 'Eve got Adam kicked out of the garden, so let's all get little Eve' That didn't bring me any closer to God.

The western Christian world believes in original sin is a result of the fall. The ancient faith I follow now has a different view. Eve was young and was begiled by the snake. Adam went along. God made them leave to protect them from being tempted by the tree of immortality. He made clothes for them and told how they would need to live outside the garden. They left the garden so that sin would not become immortal but would die at the end of each person's life(I'm not thinking here about intergeneration family abuse).

St. Athanasius of Alexandria (300's AD/CE) wrote a wonderful book about the incarnation and suffering . His refrain throughout is, "God being a good God, What was God to do?" Each paragraph bemoans the plight of humankind with a section on war, a section of murder, theivery, prostitutionand on and on. Each time the same refrain, "God, being a good God, what was God to do?" Problem for me ---I didn't know what good meant. If each hard thrust of a rape of a child is accompanied by the man saying, "Good girl, good girl,good girl" Good become the ability to bear pain and fear.... St. Athanatsius describes why it befits the dignity of humankind that Jesus should become one of us and show us what good was supposed to be. O.K. that was a start.

As for sin, we believe that we are born into a fallen and sinful world. Our suffering comes right along with it. The greatest and most God like quality of being human is our freewill. Since God is love(didn't get that one yet) he would never force us to love him. We needed to come to him of our own freewill. Freewill is so important to God that he will never force anyone to love him or step in to change any person's behavior. So those people who hurt us had freewill and chose to use it for harm....There is a line in the Bible about God shining on the just and the unjust. God is the same creator of both of them, also made in the image of God.

Because we don't believe in original sin as something we inherit down the generations, we see the Virgin Mary differently too. For us, she was born of a good normal mother who conceived her in the natural way.
She is fully human therefore she could give Jesus human his body and his blood. Now that began to make sense to me. She was much more approachable to me than a male figure at that point.

The Nicene creed and the Apostles creed are earliest creeds, still said by most christians today. Most important to those creeds is the belief that Jesus was fully man and fully God .He lived on earth and died the only way a God can die, by giving up his life voluntarily. He choose the most humiliating death so no one's death there after would be without divine blessing. We sing that 'hell cries out groaning, why was I tricked into letting this man come down here.' Jesus went down to hell to set all the captives of death free. Overcoming all death by his own death and by his resurrection made a way to eternal life for us.

I gradually felt my points of view towards God changing. Therapy taught me I didn't deserve what I got and it wasn't my purpose in life.That is what this faith tradition believes-we are all born innocent and good made in the image of God. Now I can accept that I am loveable and can understand that God loves right exactly where I am, in the pit of dispair or on level ground (it doesn't stay level for long)

So yes, my trauma has changed how I understand God now, not as filliocidal maniac, who never seems to do us any earthly good as in didn't 'stop it'. I see him as the gentle protector of our souls. The perps could steal and break all of the rest of our bodies and minds, but they couldn't corrupt our souls.... Karl Jung said,"Bidden or unbidden, God is there."
The best part of it for me is that even when I feel totally alone, I'm not because God is there. To paraphrase Psalm 23, God is my shepard, I shall not want ( He will fill the emptyness inside me so that I will never live in unrequited longing ever again.)

 

[Booknerd]

Since one of my earliest memories of terror was in a small southern church where the "Preacher" had me come down to the pulpit and kneel while he screamed at me about going to hell and needing to be saved. I think I was four or five at the time. I can still feel the carpet on my knees and thinking how my new pretty dress which was lavender with lace was now "sinful". My Mother allowed this to carry on and when I threw up all over my pretty new dress-I was an embarrassment. When I had urinated on myself because I was scared, I had to be taken home because I didn't know how to behave in public. I was the bad child and my sister made fun of me. Then Mama proceeded to get plastered after we got home and my dress had to be thrown away because she would never get it clean. My thoughts on God were a little skewed. Now, I think of "God " as a higher power with benign feelings about our screwed up little world. I go outside and can feel peace and to me that is God. Organized religion is soooo not my thing. Since religion was used as a punishment for me, I have nothing to do with a vindictive God who would kill millions of people because they don't fit the small minded peoples idea of vengence.

 

[freya]

My personal idea is that it is good (useful) for me to believe in a 'God', in other words in a power that created me, that loves me and tries to guide and support me. I see my intuition, and my capacity to feel, as my guidance.
Someone said: 'God is the good in every person' and I thought that was a good way to say it.

I believe in God, I do not believe in religion. I think any time man thinks he knows what God is or what God wants, and tries to impose his idea about that on another, wars will result, and God, as I understand it, is about peace, not about war.

I do think there is a purpose to what I went through. What I went through made me who I am today, and that's valuable to me. I think the suffering taught me that I am all the things I lost (my health, my job, my plans, my perspectives, for example). I am more than that and I can be happy, and strong, and meaningful for others in spite of what happened to me.

(Of course, that is what I think on my GOOD days...!).

Some people may be disgusted just by the word, but to me the word 'forgiveness''(and 'acceptance') mean a lot. They are guiding terms in what I see as my healing process.

I have read spiritual sources which would say that all in this world is an illusion. We are not our bodies, we are Spirit, a thought in the mind of God. In that sense we cannot be hurt. I think to accept this as truth is a big challenge.

Personally I don't feel in a position to say 'this is truth and that is not'. I think it's personal. It helps me to be calm and centered to believe in a benevolent force that is bigger than me, and that resides in the core of me at the same time.
For others it helps to not believe in a God. Basically I think everything that will help healing is good.

Freya

 

[Grechen]

ptsd has changed my view of god...well i guess technically i already had ptsd before i really had it from the death of a friend and that made me an atheist becuase i felt that right after she died, everyone was so convinced that she still existed, that they had felt her, talked to her, and i wanted so badly to think so also but i couldnt get past the fact that i wanted to too badly so any beleif i had was retarded by the severe wanting. it didnt leave room for truth. So i became an avid atheist.

My trauma was also a religious experience. The whole time i was and am going through ptsd from it, I was also having these staggering realizations about the world and life and myself. During the actual trauma I entered the deepest layer of myself. I went farther, deeper, than any living human should ever go. And what i found there after all the horror was my true self and my true worth which was infinite and the most worth possible, although no more than that of any other human. I guess it wasnt really the trauma itself that revealed this to me, more this experience that, for me, went with the trauma.

Basically the way i see it, an experience of what we call God is an experience of a connection to the universal. We are all connected to the universal at all times, we just are not tuned in to this fact. I became tuned into this fact. To me it seems that after life or no after life is simply a matter of the way you look at it. The part of you that was earthly and individual is gone, but the part of you that was, even in life, connected to the universal, remains. You could look at that as connected to the universal or as not existing, because you are not you, just a part of everything else, undiscernable. so it is really just the way that you look at it.

 

[TLight]

I believe there must be a God. I experienced evil, therefore there must be an omnipotent good. Just makes sense.

Still trying to figure out if he cares about me though. I think I've come to the conclusion he has to, or I would not have survived. There must be some purpose, even if it's just to give someone a smile who might really be affected by it.

I believe it is the biology of the brain that is torturing us. Biology and this place is imperfect, He has a reason for that..........perhaps so we can develop faith?

 

[cyndi]

Great thread. It's brought up all kinds of thoughts/questions in my head I'd been avoiding (thanks...I think :)

So, "Has Your Opinion About God Been Affected by Your Suffering?"
I guess I would say it prevented me from having a relationship with God in the way I was taught to see him. In the most common Western view, it brings up anger and whys for me. Why, then would a loving God ignore children's prayers and let abuse continue? As for my belief that every child should have an equal chance at recieving a good education, it makes sense to me that a "good" God would rescue little children. Wouldn't a decent human? In that view of God, I have some words I'd like to exchange with him if he is that way. He let me down in a big way. I've come to the conclusion that image of God has too many holes in it.

I do have huge issues with authority and religion.

The places I have seen God are fleeting but very true. I want more pieces of that to understand more. These came from within, for that matter "without" but times like when I fled with my life in danger from my ex, when I was most scared a comfort crept in that I did not create, when I was in Italy, overlooking Tuscany, I knew God created what I saw without a doubt and I was moved to drop to my knees for the beauty before me. I have felt briefly that I was loved by God and let it in, was far better a feeling than any imported dark chocolate or fabulous coffee ever gave me, that's for sure. I see it in nature mostly, and in the ways someone you barely know touch your life. I see it in the innocence of a child's eyes, in a horse's eyes. I see God as beauty. Perhaps that is what I wish God would be as child wished they were in a TV show family instead of their own.

Enough rambling for now. These are my scattered thoughts on God.

 

[docsmith]

I have seen things in my two Tours of Iraq that just make me question Religion. If God is all seeing and all knowing, why did he allow people, GOOD people to die while I was trying to save their lives? I just dont understand. There may be some being out there, but I just dont know who or where that being is.

 

[adrian_newbridge]

Stirred up a hornets nest here

I was brought up to believe in God and went to church and read my bible, all this really helped me. Then as I got older (middle aged) I started working things out for myself and doubting my beliefs. Then the PTSD came along, I started seeing people and creatures that were very lifelike but realised they were all produced by my mind, I'm sure this is what happens when people say " God spoke to me and said this and that ". I think its our mind that creates all the superstition and we are brainwashed from an early age into thinking there must be a God and there is heaven and hell. The bible's timeline works out that the earth was made around 12 thousand years ago yet we know thanks to science that it's millions of years old. sorry but I don't want to knock anybody's beliefs but I lost mine when I became ill. There is a psychological explanation of why we need religion and a God but I'm not quite sure how it goes so I wont try and write it. all I can say is if religion or belief in God helps you through your day then keep believing, but for me, sorry but it's gone