Yeah, school and other things in my life are taking up too much of my focus to properly do justice to my 10 part series...
..So, I'll be finishing up, soon, the last part of my below post #5, THEN taking a one month break, picking up again around the 20th-23rd of March..
IN THE MEANTIME, this will be an occasional "info dump" for some of my thoughts that have and are percolating in my head. :)
______________________________________________________________________
"Returning to one's religious roots and or engaging in a deeply meaningful lifestyle is more powerful of a need, has a stronger draw, and is more fulfilling than the NEED, the DRAW, and the FULFILLMENT of acquiring a new worldview.
Returning to an original us and or a deeper us is more fundamentally our desire than anything else.
The person who just tries to ONLY have a new worldview and move away from their religious upbringing and or who does not try to engage in a deeply fulfilling lifestyle and or return to their religious roots will be living a limited life..
Approaching religion & spirituality with only just some of your mind (the analytical areas), and just studying them, is approaching these things in a conditional and limited away and you will not come away from these things will a full experience of them.... And so you will not be able to say you truly grasped them! Yes, Christians can and will do this very thing in their "learning" of Science, but there are non-believers who will also do this in their "learning" of Religion. We must hold ourselves accountable or at least understand why we do this and understand that in an uncritical fashion..." -February 28th, 2013
--"I need to remember to write about WHAT the most fundamental things were for me & WHY in going back to Christianity, before I complicate the reasons I am back into Christianity... Those fundamental ideas have not come from arguments for the existence of God, the Resurrection, etc.. If there is one thing right now as I think about it that I would name as a critical reason I have gone as far back into Christianity as I have, it would be really taking seriously my communication with God and devotionals in the Bible. A factor in addition to that would be my personal relationship with my wonderful, Christian, girlfriend Ivonne.. I'll share more of this as time goes on..."
--"People sometimes analyze a certain subject too much and in the process miss the big picture and major points.. And we do this with Christianity and therefore miss the most important points in Christianity, because we are consumed with analyzing something way over in areas that aren't the most important truths of the faith.."
--…"If only understanding Christianity were that simple and only required the use of your left-brain… well, it's not that simple and requires all of your mind…" 12/8/12
--"It seems that the only way someone who is a (serious) non-believer can move into a religious worldview framework is to be immersed into it, no half-measures! Because you can't truly sample it from your intellectual armchair.. otherwise, you'll only be understanding that particular religion "intellectually".. That is just the icing on the cake and not the real substance of why that Christianity is so meaningful and crucial to these believers.."
--"Both believer & unbeliever align themselves with someone who thinks the same way they do on certain topics, who therefore they can tell they resonate with conversation. So it's not only believers who do this.. Unbelievers are just as "dogmatic" or should we call it "human" in this matter…"
--"Unrestricted behavior is not the same as freedom, because unrestricted behavior has consequences. Unrestricted behavior is chaos."
--"It is interesting that one of the most resilient living organisms on the planet, most capable of living for a very long time, even while dormant, is a virus…"
--"Learning reality through science should NOT necessarily lead to non-belief, because science doesn't help us with how to meaningfully inwardly & fulfillingly live out the rest of our lives. Science allows us to analyze what is in front of us, but it doesn't allow us to seriously reflect on what is in our heart, our spiritual condition, and how to deal with life when all hope is lost, when we might not survive a situation and when control is taken away from us..
This argues there are no Atheists in foxholes. But if a person doesn't turn to belief and to what matters most in these situations, what kind of person will they turn into when darkness falls upon them..? Living merely by rational rules is not sufficient to deal with these situations… One needs something more intrinsic, intuitive, that truly addresses that side of us, which science does not affect.."
--"The point of acknowledging our limitations is not so that we discontinue our advancement of technology and stop pushing into the stars, the point of acknowledging our limitations is so what we can focus on more areas that just our intellect.."
--……Plan to DO A POST on how my morality has changed since coming into Ivonne's life AND how it is that I'm focused on this in that I am planning on becoming a Psychologist in the future…...
--"There are Christian presumptionalists and Christian evidentialist apologists..."
--"There are nonbelievers who don't think Christians are giving enough time & attention to the evidence against the existence of God, the resurrection, a divine sorce to morality, the truth of the Bible, etc… Well, many Christians are maintaining the emotional & experiencial part of their Christianity AND when they have the emotional & mental energy THEN they look at the what the Intellectuals focus on.. yes, the intellectual side who, for the most part, ONLY uses their left analytical brain and hardly ever their right creative, emotional, experiencial brain to pursue truth…
So… what I wrote above does bring me back to: IF secular intellectuals are really not significantly less dogmatic than believers (yes, secularists are just dogmatic, just in different areas and ways), THEN is it really such a negative to truly prepare yourself to live out the rest of your life within a framework of belief, not the extreme kind.., but the kind from what I have experienced anew, which significantly more healthy of a framework the, say, Secular Humanism?"
