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Notes -
Very interesting.
Me I had almost the opposite course. I kinda left the church as a result of:
A) Seeing my fellow 'christians' make absolute messes of their lives and generally ignore biblical teachings when they were inconvenient (these two facts were probably related)
B) Never having one of those "encounter with God" moments despite being very, very open to receiving one. My inherent skepticism grew simply because it was hard to feel God's intervention in my life when I didn't seem to be getting any noticeable input from 'beyond' baseline reality. It sure seemed like what you see is what you get, and all your decisionmaking is almost entirely local to your brain, aside from the bare handful of things we haven't explained.
And I'm not a fan of the "God of the gaps" approach to faith.
I had experiences which could be described as that "still, small voice" talking to me and guiding decisions, but that was easily explained as my internal dialogue.
Another factor was engaging in 'sinful' activities but seeing that this didn't immediately result in my life combusting and didn't lead me down a path to more grievous sins. Turns out I just have a solid amount of discipline and self-control just inherently.
But over time, as you notice, there's still a need for some 'initial cause' to this whole universe. Science isn't getting us any closer to explaining it, and ultimately having some kind of God behind the scenes is still a completely viable possibility, even if atheism is the 'rational' choice. And if you gotta choose one God to be behind the scenes, the Christian God does appear as the leading contender.
Still haven't had my own personal 'miracle' to restore my faith, but it also seems like rational atheism has gone and blown itself up (Effective Altruism was an interesting fad, wasn't it?), and the huge irony is there are actually good secular reasons for accepting religious teachings. If they've survived this long, they must be adaptive!!!
Yeah, I think your complaints (perhaps the wrong word but hopefully you know what I mean) are quite valid. In fairness on the first, a good church will never pretend that its members are perfect or anything, but many Christians possess a level of self righteousness and hypocrisy that is truly galling. And I certainly understand the frustration of feeling as though God is just leaving you to do your own thing, rather than being a friend who actually helps you in your life. I myself have never had a direct experience with the divine, though I have (since returning to the faith) had things happen that I find difficult to explain by way of anything other than "God must have helped me out there".
But my experiences (such as they are) and the ones I related from my dad ultimately aren't proof, which is something I don't expect I'll ever get. It seems like God, for whatever reason, never really reveals himself to people so strongly that any reasonable person would believe that he must be at work. Lots of people (smarter people than I) have tried to explain why, so I doubt I can add anything of value to that discussion, except to agree that it does seem to be true regardless of what the reasons might be. I think that this is why faith tends to be of the "God of the gaps" nature which you find unsatisfying (and I can't blame you): it seems like God always requires people to take some leap of faith from "this seems true but I can't prove it" to "I'm going to believe in it anyway".
For what it's worth, I would say that the struggle (my own journey of faith took me something like 10-12 years with insights coming only occasionally), does seem worth it in hindsight. It sucked at the time. But having gone through it, I was able to arrive at a position which I feel much more strongly certain of than if a mysterious stranger had appeared to give me the answers. I hope that it will be the same for you, if it isn't already - not per se that you will come back to the faith, but that whatever answer you do arrive/have arrived at feels right to you because you came by it as the result of trying really hard to seek the truth.
Yes, I suspect that he works in 'mysterious ways' in the sense that his intervention might just seem like a literal one-in-a-billion chance that happens to fall your way, and the entire situation works out for your benefit, even if there completely non-divine explanations.
Me, I like solid cause-effect relationships. So it'd be really nice to have an experience where I ardently pray for [outcome], and then see [outcome] occur without my direct intervention. I've had a lot of 'experimental' results where the outcome of the situation appears completely uncorrelated with whether I prayed for it or not. Obviously there could be greater plans at work that I don't see.
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