Timberlanko:
Quote:You asked for others to share their " ... experiences with what they consider to be the spiritual realm.". That, in keeping with the topic's premise, precisely is what I did.
It most assuredly is not what you have done. What you have done, and doubtless will continue to do, is to set yourself up as the clear-thinking worldly judge of those confused and gullible sorts who hold any such spiritual belief. You make it clear from your very first post you think nothing at all of any spiritual experience - you call them "unexplained" and hold in disdain any who venture any further:
Quote:Now, as to a personal "spiritual awakening" ... well, while perhaps not exactly in keeping with the foundational premise of this thread, I'll say I woke up when I realized "unexplained" means neither more nor less than "unexplained".
You hammer that point home - that
whatever it is we're talking about shouldn't be called "spiritual", but simply "unexplained"
It is a point you clearly want to be made, here, amongst any rash and ill-considered claims about anything "spiritual" :
Quote:Emotionally satisfying or not, unexplained means neither more nor less than unexplained. It means unexplained, period.
And again, just in case any of us weren't listening to Timberlandko giving us the
real reality of the unassailable truth:
Quote:I've seen a buncha unexplained stuff, and heard of much more - its unexplained.
You ventured off briefly to magnanimously allow that not all Christians were heartless and mindless, in answer to a post by Dyslexia:
Quote:Not really; not all Christians are of the ignorant, luddite Evangelical/Fundamentalist/Biblethumper persuasion. Despite the visibility of the backwards examples, they're really nothing more than a very vocal, fairly effective minority. Of course, that does not in any way lessen the threat they and their proselytizing ilk pose.
but that was just more of the same bone you have to pick with the ills dogmatic and proseletyzing organized religion has caused the world - which, like everything else you have posted in this thread, has nothing at all to do with any experience which you yourself have considered to be spiritual.
You make it very clear in this post, in tone and verbiage, what you think of the whole idea of personal spiritual experience:
Quote:Well, I'll say "The Spiritual Realm" appeared to me to be self-evidently real untill somewhere around the time I began to seek out and read other than that fed to me by the decidedly, institutionally "spiritual" types responsible for my early gradeschool education. I'd hafta say discovering (prolly the summer between 2nd and 3rd grades, I believe) the classical Greeks, Plato and Aristotle in particular though not alone, occasioned my shift of opinion, setting me, as it were, on an objective, open ended, open-minded, ongoing search for evidenced truth and logical understanding, as opposed to self-satisfiedly wallowing in the comfort of dogmatically handed-down, illogical, counter-intuitive, counter-evidentiary myth and mystery.
So please Timberlanko -
please be courteous enough at least, if you insist on peppering the thread with your unsubtle reminders that the notion of personal spiritual experience is illogical, or unreasonable, or just plain silly, to not insult anyone's intelligence by trying to pretend as if that's not what you're doing, 'kay?
