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The Boundaries Of Faith

It is all but distant, hazy memories of the beginnings of my exposure to religion,

specifically Christianity. Images of sitting on a pew within a spacious chapel, chalk drawings,

basketball, sherbert ice cream, and childrens crafts made from popsicle sticks and colorful

accessories cross my mind when I recollect that particular experience. However, it was not until

much later that I found out from a friend from that church, called Contra Costa Gospel Church

(CCGC), that what I had been to was called Vacational Bible School (VBS), a childrens

program held at that church to teach young individuals about the basics of Christianity. I

remembered that it was my grandmother and aunt that had brought my younger cousin and me to

that program, for my grandmother was a Christian and saw VBS as a perfect opportunity to

immerse my cousin and me into the faith as well. Numerous other attempts had followed after

with holiday services, Chinese school, and summer camp retreats; but all had been in vain to

persuade me into adopting Christianity as my religion. I believe that the cause of this was due to

being raised in a predominately secular home, with a father and mother who viewed my

grandmothers antics as a way to entertain my mundane childhood rather than to teach me to

embrace faith. I was in a way acting that way too, as my childhood mentality made me see

everything around as something that can either entertain or bore me to death. Unfortunately, that

meant that I saw faith as something that was monotonous and uninteresting, enjoying the fun

activities at church programs and immediately wishing I was anywhere else when it was time for

a sermon. While I still view my relationship with Christianity in this light to this day, I did

eventually warm up to the religion. It had started with the third summer retreat I went to with my

grandma, when a school acquaintance recognized me and invited me over to sit with her and a

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few others. Eventually I got acquainted with some of those people, which persuaded me to attend

CCGC's youth group called Oasis. At first I mostly went to Oasis to have some sort of

community or social group, but it was not until multiple lessons and discussion groups later that I

had realized that I also attended Oasis to learn more about Christianity. While I still struggle with

embracing Christianity, I do respect the religion for its broad range of moral lessons and how it

brings a sense of closure for people concerning the subject of life. Unfortunately, there has

always been a part of me who never truly believes something until I witness physical evidence of

its existence. What if Christians, or any other religious group, are believing in something entirely

false and unrealistic? What if the religion is just a crazy set of beliefs made by a madman? That

is simply something I cannot rule out. The other reason is that I do not get attached easily to

something because I believe that you enjoy life as much as possible in fleeting moments at a

time. Eternity does not truly exist in my mind because things come by and go, just like the cycle

of life itself. However, I still wanted to understand, if just a little bit, how people at Oasis and at

CCGC can still believe the things they do when faced against such a nonreligious world around

them. Do they continue to believe out of long term exposure to faith since childhood or did they

honestly pursue faith out of their own interest? So that brings me to my question: How does

religion influence a persons character and values?

For the past two years of attending Contra Costa Gospel Churchs youth group, which is

called Oasis, I have seen how Christianity has played a part of many peoples lives. There are

middle school students still too innocent and naive to truly comprehend the main ideas of the

message we learn on lesson nights, all the way up to the adult counselors with matured faith. On

the surface, everyone within the youth group just seems like ordinary people that just catch up

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with one another about each others week at every meetup. Within the spacious carpeted room

lined with colorful posters about the yearly focus within Bible lessons and audio equipment for

an impending worship session, I see the young middle schoolers running and bursting with

energy along with the high schoolers and young adults nonchalantly talking away in every

moment before we began our activities. However, after the initial high energy atmosphere during

the intermission before Oasis began and the ice-breaker games, everyone starts to mellow down

once we begin the worship session. With the lights dimmed and singing their hearts out for God,

I witness the beginning of the true face of Oasis becoming revealed. Oasis is more than just the

room that it is hosted in every week, it is also the people that truly make up the youth groups

identity. Every individual is like an onion, outside of Oasis they are students and employees,

speaking about mundane subjects and stressing over every day struggles. However, once you

start peeling layers away, one worship session or lesson at a time, you finally get to see the core,

the basis of what they believe what life is worth living for. Some individuals such as the younger

members will require more peeling than others though, because they are so young their core will

definitely be smaller than others. However, do they genuinely believe in God or are they being

pushed to develop their faith by others such as their parents? How can they choose to believe in

concepts such as an afterlife or reincarnation when the world tells them that people simply cease

to exist in death? While religion influences individuals to strive to follow the right path,

however, what is considered right is only within the perspective of the individual.

Now in what possible ways can religion influence a person? There are a broad range of

possibilities that can occur, for better and for worse. However, the most common path of

influence is that religious faith brings an individual a sense of wholeness and peace, finding

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comfort in embracing a new perspective of life that is not as empty or frightening as having your

existence erased after death. It can also be plausible that religion is used as a device to push

believers into doing what is morally right, as evidenced by well known religious concepts such

as heaven and hell to allow certain people to be granted a better afterlife than others based on

how many good or bad deeds they have done. And of course, there is the common argument that

religion influences individuals to believe in false ideas, preventing them from confronting reality

fully. Freud, in his 1927 book The Future of an Illusion, termed belief in God a comforting

illusion invented by human beings to avoid facing the reality of death (DSouza 26). This, in a

sense, manipulates the idea of finding closure in the reality of death through religion into a

selfish attempt of shielding oneself from the unchanging reality that one disappears entirely after

death. Take for example the book Whats So Great About Christianity, where in an excerpt the

author Dinesh DSouza discusses how many modern atheists build their argument against

religion that believers use it to run away from reality. The foundation of many of the heavily

atheist ideas from the Enlightenment was built from modern doctrines of materialism and

naturalism, which hold that matter is the only reality and that there are no supernatural

influences in nature (DSouza 26). This area of the Enlightenment was what many influential

thinkers had used to support their theories on their atheistic approach towards religion. Marx,

for instance, portrayed religion as the "opiate of the masses," a drug that dulls the mind,

preventing it from comprehending the scientific forces acting upon history (DSouza 26). From

what this excerpt says, religion sounds as if an individual can escape the pain of death if they

believe in a higher being and act in a way that pleases that higher being. However, the main issue

many atheists have with religion is not denying the reality of death or factually proven truths

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about the world, it is those who accept a religion and deny any other theories, scientific or not,

about the world before looking into all of the multiple different explanations regarding it. When

Richard Dawkins states in The God Delusion that he holds his beliefs "not because of reading a

holy book but because I have studied the evidence. he is placing himself squarely in this

tradition of the skeptical Enlightenment (DSouza 26). This, in a sense, is why many atheists

have difficulty accepting religion, they believe that people will blindly follow an idea and obey

its rules if it benefits their desires and therefore results in preventing them from freely exploring

their own truth of the world.

However, it can be argued that the point of religion is not to follow strict morals and

instead focus on building an intimate relationship with the god of that religion. This then brings

up the argument that it is people that assume what their god desires from them and creates a mass

following based on those ideas, which becomes religion. Take what UC Berkeley student

Kwame Agyepong, a third-year molecular environmental biology major, says when asked how

religion influences him, I don't need religion to know God. I think religion is mankind's way of

siphoning things from people and making them suffer (Powell). Based on what Agyepong had

said, if people do indeed believe in a god, why do they still follow a religion with others? Is it out

of a desire for a sense of community/to fit in or do people believe that this is how choosing to

believe in something is supposed to function, with a group of others within an established

religion? The way that religion is often only seen as official when it forms a large gathering of

believers often takes away the spiritual focus of the religion, morphing it into nothing but a mass

of people who follow a set of rules in an attempt to find closure on the concept of life and death.

To choose only to follow a certain belief and obey its rules blindly, as it is believed that the god

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of that religion forbid certain worldly items or actions to be done in its presence, can also be used

as a method in which a heavily religion-based society manages to govern its people in the name

of its god. For example, take a study done by Azim Shariff, an assistant psychology professor

and the director of the Culture and Morality Laboratory at the University of Oregon, and Mijke

Rhemtulla, from the University of Kansas. Their experiment is based upon the correlation

between criminal activity and the presence of religion within different countries, with the study

done with 143,197 people that live in one of sixty-seven countries. This was their conclusion,

Indeed, a country where many more people believe in heaven than in hell is likely to have a

much higher crime rate than one where these beliefs are about equal (Cooper). When faced with

results such as these, religion can be identified as a fair system to govern individuals since each

person would technically obey a gods rules when the stake of a good afterlife is in place.

However, this system had been used and failed in the past as corrupt individuals can manipulate

the masses in believing their interpretation of Gods word if they proclaim themselves as the

rightful ruler chosen by that religion's god. It blurs the difference of Gods word and the

translation of Gods word by a higher official, thereby making that governmental system once

created by the people, not their god.

As a result, religion becomes nothing more than a process in which a group of believers

would attempt to essentially manipulate others into accepting their beliefs as the true or

correct to live, according to a higher being that may or may not exist. While that is one of the

major and logical arguments that most non-religious people have against religion, many do not

recognize that religion has emotional aspects that can give believers a purpose to live. One of the

biggest fears of humankind is being alone in the vast world beyond them. We as people are not

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equal either, as distinct social classes and decreasing class mobility allows others to live a much

more comfortable and luxurious life while everyone else toils in their jobs to earn a barely stable

living. While there have been established ideas that individuals make their own life from hard

work or that once somebody is born into a certain social class they stay there forever, it cannot

be denied that the idea of never being able to grow or change can cause many to feel empty and

hopeless of finding a reason to live. However, when individuals learn to believe and accept the

existence of a higher being, they can find strength to live through their idea of how their life will

follow through according to their religious beliefs. People often can find peace in knowing how

something will occur ahead of time, which is similar to how believers are grateful to their

rightful god or religious figure for sharing their knowledge on life to them. Another argument

many nonbelievers make against religion is how many believers believe that to earn love from

their god you must first make yourself worthy of love, therefore comes the idea of obeying rules

or doing tasks for their religion. However, that is far from the case. Take for example the main

idea of everything taught in Christianity, that Gods love will be granted as long as an individual

is honest with their beliefs and genuinely want to pursue God. This is a central difficulty for one

of my interviewees Kevin Cheng, a youth intern at Contra Costa Gospel Church in charge of

leading the student ministries from 6th grade through college. When asked what one of the major

challenges of his job was, he responded:

One of the major challenges of my job is for the things we teach to become more than
just surface level behavior. When we teach them that they are loved, it's something that's
easily remembered, but it's not something that is easily internalized. It's much harder for
someone to believe that they are loved, to feel it, to depend on it, and to respond to it,
than it is for them to just recognize that statement as something that we teach. There is a
vast difference between someone who views Christianity and religion and their
relationship with God as a set of rules and behavior modification and someone who lives
out a life of faith. To get to that point can be a struggle, but one that is worthwhile.

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Religion in this case becomes something truly powerful, it is a way in which people learn to find

value in themselves instead of the world through their god. Individuals learn to be grateful of the

life given to them by their god and therefore continuously pursue faith to return the love that was

given unconditionally to them by God. This excerpt from The Shaking of the Foundations helps

to describe this feeling, in which the author Paul Tillich quotes a psalmist as a solution for

overcoming hatred and shame of being a flawed human before God, The psalmist offers another

solution. I praise Thee for the awful wonder of my birth;. Thy work is wonderful. For Thou

didst form my being, and weave me together in my mothers womb. None of my bones were

hidden from Thee, when I was made in secret and molded in the lowest parts of the earth.

(Tillich 47) Many people learn to live their lives under the idea that they must be of value to the

world and to others. We as a society tend to disgrace those who choose to focus on themselves

more than others because we believe that everyone should contribute to make the world better.

At times people then believe that they are working for the sake of working, that it is their

inescapable role in life. It can become harrowing and empty to hold on to such a belief, that you

work to contribute to the society that gave you life and die, such as the cycle of life goes.

However, to live because an individual believes that God had loved them so much to breathe life

into their existence is another story. God does not require a believer to fulfill or do anything for

them other than to trust in God. As a result, some believers want to spread their religion among

as many people as they can so that they may learn of this love as well. Many believers also tell

others of their religion in hopes of saving them from common perspectives on non religious

life from religious beliefs such as a sinful world or allowing more people to have a more

hopeful perspective of life in general. This was the main focus of the answer that my interviewee

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Edward Cheng, English Pastor at Contra Costa Gospel Church, gave me when I had asked what

had made his job fulfilling:

There are two things that make this job fulfilling. One is from a human perspective and
one from a God perspective. From the people perspective, the job is fulfilling when
people indicate to me that they appreciate what we are doing here at Contra Costa Gospel
Church. When the day in and day out work results in long term relationships with the
people in my church, that is fulfilling. From the God perspective, what I mean by that
is that my work is fulfilling because the Bible tells me that serving the Lord and His
purposes is a good thing, and is worth it. I take that to be true and thus is provides for me
a sense of fulfillment even during times when the human fulfillment is lacking. When I
have both, the job is especially fulfilling.

Throughout the research process for this paper, I have learned religion influences

individuals to find strength to continue living in their gods shared knowledge of life or love for

the world in which that god created. Their character is then impacted at the rate in which they

learn to accept this belief, as faith does not come as instantaneous gratification to the believer.

While faced with the nature of the world and the the concept that purpose in life does not exist

before one crafts it, the believer must continuously be exposed with these conflicting thoughts

until they find strength in themselves to put all their faith in their god or primary religious

concept. Choosing to further their relationship with their god through obeying their gods word

or changing their behavior is unneeded, but the believer can still freely pursue this if they believe

themselves that it will bring them closer to their god. As long as their view is not shrouded by

worldly issues or that abuse their gods love, a believers faith can remain genuine in the eyes of

their god. It is a learning process for many young believers, to look beyond behavior

expectations and the impulse to obey rules, to find that what lies for them is a renewed purpose

of life and an emotional connection unlike one they have ever experienced.

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Works Cited

Electronic

Cooper, Matt. Around the O. Around the O, University of Oregon, 22 Mar. 1970,

around.uoregon.edu/content/researcher-religion-influences-behavior-%E2%80%94-both-

good-and-bad. Accessed 21 Mar. 2017.

Powell, Bonnie Azab. What Role Does Religion Play in Your Life? What Role Does

Religion Play in Your Life?, NewsCenter, 9 Nov. 2004,

www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/11/09_pov.shtml. Accessed 21 Mar. 2017.

Primary Sources

Cheng, Kevin. Youth Director of Contra Costa Gospel Church, Walnut Creek, CA. Personal

Interview. 4 Feb. 2017.

Cheng, Edward. English Pastor of Contra Costa Gospel Church, Walnut Creek, CA. Personal

Interview. 16 Feb. 2017.

Print

D'Souza, Dinesh. What's So Great about Christianity. N.p.: Tyndale House, 2008. Print.

Tillich, Paul. The Shaking of the Foundations. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011. Print.

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