(April 20, 2014 at 2:12 pm)whateverist Wrote: Welcome aboard! In all seriousness, I wonder what you were looking for when investigated various religions. I don't mean to mock you for it. I also take the fact of religion on face value as an important cultural phenomenon to understand in order to understand the human condition.
In response to your question, whateverist, I have always been a very curious and observant person. I love exploring things, especially systems, and human systems in particular. I take great interest in philosophy the influence of it's many forms throughout human history.
As a child, I knew no one who thought the way I did. I was born into a world of religious, theistic people whose systems of dogma and rituals informed people and cultures at their foundations. That interests me. What also interested me is that people tended to read their respective holy books in a highly subjective fashion if they read them at all, taking that which fit what they liked and ignoring the rest, regardless of evidence of need for more critical examination.
Visiting churches and religions and reading religious holy books was simply another deliberately chosen part of my education in childhood. The first rule of winning or doing well is to know who and what you are dealing with.
If someone is a theist or religious than that is part of who they are as a person; how their mind works, and how they live their lives. We all live and work in this world with the rest of humanity, even more so for a person like me who works in the social sciences. Thus, such exploration was certainly beneficial for my personal life and my work.
Highly-informed, well-informed people are well-armed and for them, the sky is the limit.
MissionPossible
