Re: this is heather
anonymous
July 28 2008, 08:56:34 UTC
there was another paragraph before the last one that i posted. I should have included it before but Heather was getting tired of typing. " I can remember wondering about this question of doing God's will as a young child growing up in a rural protestant church. There was no doubt in my mind,even then, that this particular church and the surrounding community were special. Community support and loving interaction still led to the barn raisings and a quick response to sicknessin a member's family. The ProtestantChristianity the members practiced was suprisingly open and nonjudgmental for that time." These are just quotes from a book, I'm not a Christian(and I'm disagreeing with it either, It's just not my personal belief) He also states in the preface: "We know now that one actually has to suspend or "bracket" skepticism and try in every way possible to open up to spiritual phenomena in order to experience them. We must "knock on the door," as it has been expressed in Scripture, before any of these spiritual experiences can even be detected at all. If we approach spiritual experience with a mind that is too closed and doubting, we perceive nothing and thereby prove to ourselves, quite erroneously and repeatedly, that higher spiritual experience is a myth. For centuries, we cast out these perceptions not because they weren't real, but because at the time, we didn't want them to be real. They didn't fit into our secular view of the world. As we shall see in greater detail later, this skeptical attitude gained supremacy in the seventeenth century because the failing medieval worldview it succeeded was so full of contrived theories, charlatans on power trips, hexes and salvation for sale, and all manner of insanity. In this setting, thinking people longed for an established, scientific description of the physical universe that cut through all the nonsense. We wanted to see the world around us as reliable and natural. We wanted to be free of all the superstition and myth, and create a world where we could develop economic security- without thinking that strange and weird things were going to popup in the dark and scare us. Because of this need, we understandably began the modern age with an overly materialisticand simplified view of the universe." ...
" I can remember wondering about this question of doing God's will as a young child growing up in a rural protestant church. There was no doubt in my mind,even then, that this particular church and the surrounding community were special. Community support and loving interaction still led to the barn raisings and a quick response to sicknessin a member's family. The ProtestantChristianity the members practiced was suprisingly open and nonjudgmental for that time."
These are just quotes from a book, I'm not a Christian(and I'm disagreeing with it either, It's just not my personal belief)
He also states in the preface: "We know now that one actually has to suspend or "bracket" skepticism and try in every way possible to open up to spiritual phenomena in order to experience them. We must "knock on the door," as it has been expressed in Scripture, before any of these spiritual experiences can even be detected at all.
If we approach spiritual experience with a mind that is too closed and doubting, we perceive nothing and thereby prove to ourselves, quite erroneously and repeatedly, that higher spiritual experience is a myth. For centuries, we cast out these perceptions not because they weren't real, but because at the time, we didn't want them to be real. They didn't fit into our secular view of the world.
As we shall see in greater detail later, this skeptical attitude gained supremacy in the seventeenth century because the failing medieval worldview it succeeded was so full of contrived theories, charlatans on power trips, hexes and salvation for sale, and all manner of insanity. In this setting, thinking people longed for an established, scientific description of the physical universe that cut through all the nonsense. We wanted to see the world around us as reliable and natural. We wanted to be free of all the superstition and myth, and create a world where we could develop economic security- without thinking that strange and weird things were going to popup in the dark and scare us. Because of this need, we understandably began the modern age with an overly materialisticand simplified view of the universe." ...
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