- Date posted
- 5y
- Date posted
- 5y
I don't imagine that there's any reliable way to know. Things getting all crazy in the world does tend to aggravate worries like this, doesn't it? That's very understandable. My best advice would be not to worry and stress about it. If your religion values things like compassion, good deeds and gratitude, then those can be great things to focus on and use as a moral guide. I know that there's nothing which would convince you that even obsessively doing those things would guarantee you'd be saved, because nobody can know that. Try to remember that compassion, which I suspect your religion encourages, extends to self-compassion. And another element of religion is faith and trust. Even if your faith wavers sometimes, which is very normal, you can practice trust by allowing yourself to treat your OCD and live without suffering. I can't imagine that a benevolent god would penalise you for having wavering faith at the time of your death, either. So my advice would be to take those elements of trust and compassion, and the knowledge that your God wants the best for you and for your life, and give yourself permission to treat your OCD rather than existing in the suffering you are experiencing now. I know that if I was a god, that's what I would want for you- strength, compassion and acceptance.
- Date posted
- 5y
Perhaps if you can focus on living well (but not obsessively) according to your religion, rather than worrying about the eventual outcome, that can give you some comfort and give you something else to focus on. This life is a gift and it's important not to waste it- your God would want you to be happy and at peace. Making mistakes and doing things imperfectly when trying to follow your religion is a part of being human, and you were made human. We are all flawed, and hopefully you can have some confidence that you're loved including your flaws.
- Date posted
- 5y
This MIGHT help: What if there IS a God, who punishes everyone who believes in him through faith and insufficient evidence, and only rewards people who are skeptical? There could be plenty of reasons to think this- like that god made us unique and gave us our brains so perhaps rational thinking, being courageous and resisting social and cultural pressures to follow the local religion is a virtue. Yes we don't have any old books and scriptures about a god like this, but the god might have deliberately created all the god superstitions in order to test us. It would explain why all the religions look largely the same and appear to be social constructs. There's no way of knowing. So if you can now find yourself torn between believing in which of all the different religions, and atheism, AND believing that they're all put there to test you by the real god who wants you to resist them, then the only solution you have left is to stop trying to work it out. Literally anything could be true. It could be reincarnation until you learn a particular lesson, even, or all a simulation by a supercomputer which is living all these different lives in order to metaphysically progress in some way. There are no answers to be found. The best thing to do is probably just to live your life as a good person. I don't think any of the gods would hate on that.
- Date posted
- 5y
This all really mess up my Head, I cant know everything or wich Christian religion is right and preaching right. I want to do The right thing, do What God want me to do and I want to be saved. I have lack If faith often and doubts as well. This os why I obsessing só much and looking for assurance and reassurance
- Date posted
- 5y
I see! Well, we can't know what's right and get a guarantee about it. Very smart people have tried to work that out for a very long time, and OCD doesn't grant any magical powers of flawless problem solving unfortunately. Personally, the fact that there are so many religions is a big reason for me to believe that they're collections of myths and superstitions. It would be a bit strange if that was true for 99.9% of them but just one of them is actually right and for some bizarre reason it looks almost exactly like all the wrong ones: sets of old books, similar rituals, similar stories etc. When I am faced with the same question of which to believe, and when people tell me I should "believe just in case", I know that there is no rational reason for me to pick any 1 of them over all the others. That problem is called Pascal's wager. And which religion you belong to is pretty much completely dependent on geography- where you're born in the world. I don't know why a god would create so many billions of people born in places with no access to info of Christianity and a different dominant religion, and then punish them for it. But that's enough about my reasons. It sounds like you're going to need to settle on picking a rough idea, and letting go of your worries about details. If you're confident about Christianity being the way to go, perhaps you can adopt some general advice of Christianity like those moral things I talked about and focus on them. There's no way to get an answer to the problem you're trying to solve, and at this point trying to solve the problem is becoming another problem. If you can settle on the idea that being loving and good is *probably* good enough, that can be a way to move forwards. There are no certainties about this topic for any of us, so we should decide on a good "probably", and then focus on living our lives.
- Date posted
- 5y
You'll definitely find it easier to cope with the prospect of accepting a "maybe" and having trust that things will be okay if you work on your OCD and compulsions, though. In the middle of an OCD crisis isnt the time to be making decisions and answering personal questions about your beliefs. Could you try to do some exposures and treatment for reducing your emotional response and the compulsions to ruminate and ask for reassurance, and then reassess about what you believe?
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