I need advice about Faith, Christianity, Spirituality...

The best thing you can do is read the Bible, and of course pray. Let God do the rest.

I will, thank you for the advice. I have been trying to put my faith in God’s hands.

- Seek fellowship with people who follow the same or a similar path.

- Minimize the influence of people who distract or detract you from your chosen path.

- Observe your religious/spiritual practice consistently and faithfully.

Thank you for the advice!

My pleasure…welcome to Fluther!

I believe the saying goes Seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be opened to you.

Just keep asking questions, and God will supply the answers.

“The best thing you can do is read the Bible”

I can’t help but say, don’t take Spinel’s advice…please. Unless you are reading it to point out the inconsistencies/contradictions/fallacies and racist/sexist/homophobic stories then sure go ahead. Supporting such an embarrassingly horrible book is the worst thing you can do.

It’s best to know what you seek. Books are nice, but have you every studied anything without a class? – something to keep in mind.

What faith are you most familiar with? What do you seek?

@HTDC She did say “Christian”...

Also read books written by Christians, for example Dietrich Bonhoeffer

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Together-Classic-Exploration-Community/dp/0060608528/

Remember, God is dead and we’re all alone.

Leave it alone, and get out while you’re in a less rapturous state. If you want to live in faith, live with faith in yourself. In life you are the only one who is able to change your circumstances, and trying to get a closer connection with an imaginary being is not going to help your ability to deal with life yourself.

We are the memories and experiences of our lives, good and bad. I might be wrong but I suspect that what you experience is loss of innocence, and is something that can never be recovered. It’s a part of life, and I too feel a longing for what I feel was a better time, and different beliefs.

I am an atheist, but all I can say is that I don’t think that you will ever get back to that place that you speak of, but you can and probably will get to another that is equally beautiful and serene. I think faith changes as everything else in life.

Faith cannot be forced, it comes from within and by itself.

Take care!

I would be the kind of person @SABOTEUR warned you about. I see I’m not the only one in here.

While you’re at this point in life, before looking for ways to get back into the faith mind-set, please first take a moment to reconsider if you should. Is faith a good thing? Could you explain to yourself why it is?
If your answer is yes, then you have my blessing to go for it. But please give it some serious thought first. While you still can.

Why do you need to live ‘in faith’?

I personaly think you don’t need religion, religion is man made, and is a set of rules written by man to control man.

Don’t worship any god, any god who would be so vein as to want ‘his children’ to devote their whole lives to him and worship him is not a god I would want to go back to.

What is the point of being on this earth if the only reason you were put here was to worship a god who only lets you into ‘his kingdom’ is if you spend your whole life repenting sins worshiping god and repenting for not believing in him (I say him, but what god would need gender for I don’t know!).

Why not commit sins, and who says their sins anyway?. If you use your intuition you’l know what are trully sins and what are not.

Any religion that says you ‘must’ subscribe or go to ‘hell’ is a bullshit manmade control system.

If you grew up in a tribe on an island and never new any language, do you think that you would have needed faith in any god?

Do you believe that any of the tribes that exist across the world are going to hell because they have no knowledge of a god and don’t devote their lives to one?

Ultimately conforming to any religion that is presented to you by somebody else or with somebody elses opinion is not your own choice and therefore not being true to yourself.

My conclusion to life, which I’ve formed from what I’ve read and learned, and from my own personal experiences:

If you love and are loved, nothing else in life really matters, for in the blink of an eye you’ll be dead for eternity, and live forever. So cherish and validate those you love everyday, as the connections made on this side of life must shorley follow on to the next.

you could check out… Soul Pancake It’s a a great funky way to look at spirituality and encourages you to find your own path rather than following any outdated traditional organised religion which might do more harm than good… : / ... :-)

I 2nd with @lynneblundell, soulpancake is a great site made up of members of various spiritual outlooks engaging and supporting one another.

I’m surprised at the advice for him to read the Bible. Reading the Bible is what made me become an atheist. It’s a book that’s not only clearly mythology but also condones and commands slavery, rape, and genocide. The god of the Bible is the only deity to actually order his followers to commit genocide (see Deuteronomy 20:16, the entire book of Joshua).

You don’t need the religion of this ancient text to have a fulfilling, wonderful, connected, and loving life. Millions of people are proof of this.

@Qingu based on the tags, and the description and the main part of the question, he wants advice on how return to Christianity, not have several people (who have drifted away from the subject of the question) tell him to consider something else. That’s why I put “Bible.” It is the main book of Christianity, after all. Its the path Cantua has chosen for himself and he wanted advice on making the journey along that path.

This guy is one of my heroes, although he’s an atheist (I would tend to disagree though I wouldn’t put a Jihad on his arse!) he’s bang on about religeous BS and dogma.

Pat Condell A well researched writer and comedian.

Are you a member of a church? You should talk to your clergyman. He/she should have some good suggestions of how to better live in faith.

Hey man, if you want to become more involved in your faith, go for it. Don’t let any one-Christian or atheist-tell you other wise. My advice to you is to simply pray. Listen, be open minded. Don’t force it. Reading the Bible is good, but can sometimes be tiresome. Yet there are many people who have found comfort and faith in the Scriptures.
All in all, let God come to you. Let him in.

@Maximillian or her… or it…

@lynneblundell I really don’t want to get into that right now. Maybe somewhere else. But not here where someone is choosing to go back.

sorry, :-) it wasn’t meant to goad… I’m not that type of jelly/ie, was just expressing that’s all xxxxxxx xxx

@Spinel The reason I did not directly answer the question is because I think there is more to it that what is directly addressed in the words. Why does @cantua wish to return to their faith? Likely it is because they feel energised, accepted and valued in the church setting, and maybe they feel a need to because its what they ‘should do’. Instead of helping him/her to return to their faith, I decided to answer what I think is the real issue at hand, which is having a happy successful life. You did answer the question, but so did the rest of us; just on a different level.

@lynneblundell Its all good.

@cantua i’ve noticed in myself and others that “drifting away” happens when there is something in our experience of God that is disappointing us and we don’t know how or are scared to face it. Sometimes it is as complexly simple as things start to run dry because there is something deeper waiting for us and the status quo is no longer enough. All this rambling to say: I wonder if your noticing, of the desire to experience faith, is actually an invitation to something deeper and not something that was.