OJani wrote:
I've gone from a firm atheistic view to a more open agnostic one in the past years. I don't believe in God but I admit no one can tell. Spiritually believing in something supernatural may be better for overall mental health and functioning, but - as many stated here - my mind just doesn't work that way. It's way too concrete in thinking style for that.
There are some wonderful messages on this thread in the last two days. In response to this one, I do not know if a person needs to believe in the supernatural powers of the universe to have faith, but rather in ones own innate capacity to actualize according to physical laws regarding ones one conscious relationship to the universe (which functions according to these natural laws) what one m,ay need in order to survive. As this thread progresses, maybe we can go into how this might work/ Personally I understand basically all the organically evolved religions of humanity to be talking about this subject in the form of allegory.
Re the concrete thinking style of many here, there may be some interesting out of the box reasons for this aside from being born this way. For instance, a lot of autistic people are anxious, and anxious people probably feel more comfortable with the concrete, as the shift between two different dimensions can be threatening. (I guess you kind of implied this:-)
But re a concrete thinking style, a lot of people have it who are not autistic--by a lot, meaning a very lot. And are these people born this way? Generally speaking I would say no. Whether a person has a taste for allegory or not would depend on his childhood exposure and general education and conditioning around various styles of thinking.. My own childhood experience, which I will write about sometime, led me to be able to process allegorical material and have a love for it, and then from the age of about twenty one I deliberately dedicated myself to increasing this capacity to the nth. I always did like to ponder, even as a child, but I am not sure I was born with this, either, though I used to think I was.
I will write more on transubstantiation or whatever people want to call it and the early Christians, but I do not have time today. The key point I think is to try to keep it simple, so I would like to focus more on how faith itself is an act of transforming substances in ones own brain and body. I think everyone here can understand that if we look at it from this angle and do not get too technical. Personally, since I out and out love religion, I would love to go very deeply into the subject of the Eucharist, but I am going to check myself and refrain for now. By the way, spell check wants me to capitalize this word, Eucharist, but somehow this irks me:-) I do think it is interesting, though, and can be used to make some kind of point about the Catholic church and religion in general.
12 Apr 2014, 1:15 am
