"Dealing With Your Inner Skeptic"

"5. He makes you believe you have to have indubitable, perfect certainty before you can believe with integrity.

It’s either black or while for the inner skeptic. (He is quite the fundamentalist.) Either you believe or you don’t. On a scale from zero to ten, you are one or the other. If you present yourself as a five he will convince you that you are really a zero by drawing attention to your lack of perfect faith. He is caught up in a modernistic ideal of perfection and thinks if God were real, he would make your faith perfect immediately.[...]

(But he does not tell you to keep from going to bed at night because you are not certain that you will wake up. He does not tell you to keep from marrying because you are not certain your spouse will be faithful. More importantly, he does not tell you that while there are very few things in this life that we have infallibly perfect certainty about, that does not mean we don’t commit to things sincerely.)

***

The primary thing the skeptic does to keep you in Purgatory is make you think he has just enough. Just enough for what? Just enough to cause you to be hesitant, just enough to cause you to be indecisive, just enough to make you immobile in your faith. But again, what are his better options? He doesn’t have any. All he can do is criticize what you believe, belittling you to the point of submission. Ask him to show his hand and you will find he doesn’t have much. He just want to talk about yours. 

I love the story in John 6 where Jesus is talking to people about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. People were getting grossed out and offended. They all started leaving. Jesus turned to Peter and the rest of the Apostles and said, “Are you going to leave me too?” Peter responded with a wonderful response for those of us who spend any time talking to our inner skeptic: “Where else are we going to go? You have the words of eternal life.” It was not as if the Apostles got what Jesus was trying to say about the flesh and the blood. In fact, they were confused as well. Jesus was acting kinda odd. But, they did not have any better options. Jesus was enough. 

What I ask my inner skeptic is this: “Where else are you asking me to go? Atheism? Islam? Scientology? Perpetual indecisiveness? What are the positive arguments for such things? You cannot negatively argue me out of Christianity.” Yes, I have a lot of questions. Yes, I even have some doubts. But the inner skeptic has no goods. Ultimately, even on his best day, his case against Christ is not enough to keep me from following Jesus. 

In the end, this is how you must live everyday. Those of you who are in the Purgatory of doubt, where else are you going to go? What is really better? If you have no answer for this (and some of my presuppositional friends are going to get angry here), it is enough. It is enough to begin praying again. It is enough to read your Bible again with enough confidence. It is enough for you to take Jesus’s hand again. It is enough for you to get up each day and commit your life over to him. "

 - http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/10/dealing-with-your-inner-skeptic-while-in-the-purgatory-of-doubt/

by one C Michael Patton from Credo House, apparently a coffee house in Oklahoma that serves theology with your drink (not a bad idea, eh?)