(08-16-2024, 09:09 AM)FlickerOfLight Wrote:
In my experience, logic and reason are not what leads us to finding and walking into "The Kingdom of Heaven."
Lean not on your own understanding.
Unless you become like a little child you will never see the Kingdom of heaven.
I dunno. Maybe.
I can say that logic and reason are what brought me to join a church, get baptized, and start studying the Bible all those many years ago. Logic and reason dictate that there has to be something beyond mere random chance, because random chance would not have produced the long string of impossible probabilities that, over several billion years and building one upon the next with the previous one being prerequisite to the development of the next step, led to me even existing.
After having read the religious texts of several religions, logic and reason are what have convinced me that the Bible is the most likely answer to life's questions. It's the only one I've found with any internal consistency at all. Now that is not to say that I am a Christian, because I'm not, despite what Grace may try to tell you. Most of the "Christians" I've been around are not the sort of people I would willingly associate with, and therefore I refuse to take on their name. Most of them, from what I've seen, tend to ignore the bible. Not altogether, mind you - they will pick and choose what they do and don't want to believe, and then make up fantastic rationales for it, while ignoring the rest of the Bible. I've no time for foolishment like that. It's either all or none.
They will read it "wrong", with an eye to "proving" their own pet doctrines. That's not how it works. When they "lean on their own understanding", they are actually just reading the parts they like, and ignoring the parts they don't, and perhaps purposefully misunderstanding the spirit in which any given passage was written. Doing that, they just can't see the cohesiveness of it... and THAT leads them to lead others astray, to place a "stumbling block in their path".
I.e they are not "rightly dividing the word of God". You can't get there from here when you are holding the map upside down.
Regarding "becoming like a little child", I've never grown up, so regression is difficult. Like I said above, I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. Maybe it would be more precise to say I've never changed from childhood. My Dear Old Dad used to claim that even when I was tiny, I was just a really short adult - in his words, even when I was little, "there wasn't any bullshit about him". So, it may be that I never grew up, OR it may be that I never was a child. In the end, the two may be exactly the same thing.
Nowadays, all my hair and teeth are falling out, and in just a few short years, I'll likely be in diapers again... so there may actually BE a second childhood on the agenda!
If I manage to live long enough, that is...
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