Cope with Losing Faith in Your God

Realising that you are losing faith in your god can be disturbing and lonely. This will not necessarily mean questioning the existence of a God, it can also mean questioning God’s worth or love. It does not help that this often happens during a difficult change or tragedy in a person’s life. Faith is important to everyone’s life, it gives meaning, importance and comfort, but faith does not have to be faith in a god. It can be faith in yourself and other people.

Steps

  1. Keeping Family and Friends
  2. Keep going to social and ceremonial events. These may include weekly worship, meetings and holidays.
  3. Decide whom you do and don't want to tell. It's important to talk to someone, but can be hard to find someone who will listen without judgement, while also understanding what losing faith means.
  4. Ask your family and friends for time and space, if they insist on trying to help you back to faith. Tell them you must sort it out yourself in your own head.
  5. Avoiding talking about it to strongly religious members of your family and friends. Resentment and anger toward your god, religion or religions in general is normal, but best not shared with some people.
  6. Re-Finding Faith. Probably the most basic, but vital steps to lessen the pain.
  7. Recognize the important things in your life. These could be your friends and family, and yourself. It can also be smaller things like your work, pets, home and small family traditions.
  8. Find more important things. Not everyone is happy with their job, or thinks of it as important, but work doesn’t have to be a job. Charity, political and voluntary work is worthwhile and helps expand your social network.
  9. Re-awaken your old dreams. Most people don’t end up being “what I want to be when I grow up”, but there’s no reason why you can re-awaken some of these dreams, in the form of a hobby, training course, voluntary work, or career or lifestyle change.
  10. Spend time and energy on the things that are important, not the things that aren’t. If you are working over-time so you can take your family on an expensive holiday, spend the evenings with your kids and take them on a camping holiday {{safesubst:#invoke:convert|convert}} away instead.
  11. Just because you are no longer superstitious; just because you are moving away from belief in the supernatural, does not mean you need to leave your values or identity behind. You easily can uncover the true, hidden foundations and origins of the most important guidance you found in your former religion. It can be found by studying the history of the religions that man has invented, and why; such as found in Christian author Houston Smith's The World's Religions. Then come back to your life, in the world today, and study the modern synthesis of those positive, early motivations, such as are found in the current philosophy of Humanism. There you can gain steadfast strength, self esteem, purpose, and compassion beyond what was attainable in your former life as a believer in the ethereal, the ever-changing, and the inexplicable.

Tips

  • You may or may not re-gain your old faith. Remind your family and friends (and yourself) that faith cannot be switched on and off at command.
  • Some people may try to make a joke out of it, they are probably not trying to be mean, but don't understand. Tell them not to, rather then grin and bear it.

Warnings

  • Don't cut off your friends and family, even if they are heavily connected with your religion.

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