Find Your Own Faith

When it comes to Christians, few are more aggravating than those who live as blind sheep, following some distant shepherd, trusting his or her every word, every creed, and never trying to learn things for themselves, never trying to find their own convictions. Humans were given minds with the mental capacities to consider, deduce, and decide things for themselves, and if only, if only they would actually use them. Your beliefs, your values, your praises and condemnations - all worthless if they are nothing but echos of another voice. I am not saying that you should disregard everything you have been taught, everything you have perhaps been brought up in, but please, for the love of God, at some point in your life, detach yourself from it all - and just think.

In the words of John Stuart Mill...

"He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess."

(From his On Liberty - whoever said that nineteenth century political philosophy was irrelevant to everyday life? ;) )

If it is faith that you need, or want, find it for yourself.