>We humans have a couple of choices. We can decide who and what we are and how we want our life to be, then, strive to achieve our purpose as intelligently as possible using our life as the standard of measurement as to what works and what is true. Or,...
We can let other people's fanciful opinions hijack our sense of purpose and destiny and spend our entire life in a rut of ritual performance waiting for some magic to happen.
That is a false dilemma, Terry. There are more possibilities than that, for instance: We can explore the mystical aspects of life (that is a natural part of our humanity), examine evidence and experience teachings that are handed down over millennia. We are adults, we need no one to tell us how to decide.
>If your thinking is guided by practical everyday living you go one direction, and, if your thinking is guided by superstition and magic thinking you go off in another direction.
Here is a straw man. You assume that spirituality is nothing more than ‘superstition and magic thinking’. You assume that spirituality is not practical. Do you have some guideline that is absolute that no one else has ever discovered?
>I find religious people aren't really alive. They are hand-puppets going through the motions of some senseless direction of whoever has a hand up their ass.
Oh, how crass. Are you the one who knows enough to tell us what is ‘really alive’ and what is ‘really living’? You act as if you yourself are not a product of your environment, a puppet of some belief system. Everyone has a god, whether it be self..ish pride, money, sex, you name it and it is an idol if it is what we live for.
>Choose to live by experiencing life for yourself. The alternative is incredibly wasteful of the time you have to transcend mere existence.
What in the world does this mess of ‘deep thinking’ really say? Why might you assume that a believer would not 'experience living for themselves'?
>The BIBLE has been advertised to us since birth as a kind of magic answer book which it is not.
‘Science has been advertising itself as some kind of ultimate reality that pretends to answer the true meaning of life.’ The Bible, when studied seriously, has a remarkable insight into the human soul. It is a 'road map' for life and a 'manual' of man himself. It is a mirror that tells us our motivations and why we are AS we are. It contains numerous types of literature, written over millennia by man writers, yet it may answer the very questions that life itself cause us to ask: what is 'evil', why does it happen, what is beyond this life, etc.?
>Substituting the hodge-podge of pseudo-history, fable and mind-control for life experience cripples you and hobbles your rational thinking.
Mind control is what happens in a spiritually abusive cult. Not all that is mystical, nor even a large part of it is spiritually abusive. Can your ‘rational thinking’ teach you about the miracle of a live birth, the design inherent in a brain that can use sensory powers to walk, talk, see, hear, pray and imagine? If all of humanity could not get past the contemplation of its own navel we wouldn’t be here. Nihilistic thinking leads to a dismal existence and the champion of this philosophy was driven to suicide…..
>Stop measuring purpose and meaning by the mythos of prehistoric guesswork propped up by authority figures who want to use you.
Are you describing the icons of the present scientific establishment whose theories are contradictory, unobservable and undemonstrable?
>IF God existed and had a purpose it would not be derailed for thousands of years and become entirely dependant on the whim of an inferior choice mechanism of a creature driven by short term passions: humans.
Why is that? What evidence is this assertion based upon? What stands in the way of the providence of God? If your idea of God is limited to the JW teachings and open-theism you don't understand what God is!
>But, there is only God for those who create Him.
How can you know that, are you in fact, God?
>For the rest of us, life is for living and the mind is for thinking and creating an experience of existence that is as incredibly thrilling and satisfying as lies within our power to construct by excellent choices.
Where is your rationality here? Aren’t you contradicting yourself? Are you somehow superior to everyone wh o sees God from the immensity of creation down to the bond that can grow between a human and a pet that 'adopts' him?
>Dump the mythology and get on with living your life.
Mythology by definition contains truth.
>Straighten your thinking out by abandoning superstition and hearsay.
That is a partial definition of your post!
< Be practical, be rational and break the addiction of craving other people's opinions on mystical nonsense parading as fact.
Be practical, resign yourself to a hopeless average existence of seventy years, have no access to the spiritual world by denying it exists, no truth to live your life by and then die a useless life of pain and turmoil. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a country where one is not coddled, live a short life of desperation and die as a result of the randomness of fate? You might count your blessings and quit whining....
>I wish you the best.
Do you have the best?
Rex