Atheist Turned Believer

    I recently listened to a NPR broadcast in which the commentator was interviewing a psychologist who had lately published his findings from an exhaustive study on delusions.  The psychologist's conclusion was that delusions obviously serve a human need (since we all have them), but as for what need they serve the study was inconclusive.      When asked for an example, the psychologist mentioned the concept of nationalism.  He pointed out that there is nothing in nature that would suggest any need for nationalism.  From orbit, astronauts cannot detect national borders on the face of the earth.  Animals pay no attention to borders; they simply go where the food is.  And plants, well plants just follow the wind.  The idea of nationalism is a completely human construct.  We made it up.  It's a delusion that we all share.  Yet, the delusion is so strong that hundreds of thousands of us are willing to both kill and ...

     What are you afraid of?  What's your greatest fear?   Are you afraid of snakes?  Planes?  High places?  Crazy drivers?  Clowns?  Ghosts?  Death?      For one semester (back during our college days) my wife switched her major from Biology to Psychology.  During that semester, she tried me out on a test designed to determine a person's phobias.  She was somewhat shocked to find that, according to the test in her textbook, I have no phobias or fears.  That seemed about right to me.  As a good friend once described me, I tend to be one of those people who runs toward the danger.      I've had the privilege of surviving for 4 decades since then, and I hope to have learned a few things in the interim.   I'm pretty sure that the reason I don't have any fears is because that test didn't check for the one thing I am afraid of.  There's one fear that everyone shares, and w...

  "If you wish to feed the body, eat a salad.  If you wish to feed the mind, read a book.  If you wish to feed the soul, pray."                                                                                                                                                                                                           -  Me   Some years ago, there was a...

 So I decided to work on my prayer life.  I had several issues with the concept of prayer at the time. (1) Public prayer never seemed to have much to do with communing with God, nor did it seem intended to do so.  Public prayer seemed to be written and recited to be as poetic as possible, appealing more to the human listeners than to any divine ones.  This wasn't actually too big of a problem for me.  Trained as I was in public speaking, I was perfectly aware that poetry can move an audience in ways that rhetoric cannot.  For example, I would place the poetry of Lincoln's Gettysburg address against anything from the pen of Shakespeare, and its no accident that we still memorize Lincoln's three minute speech, but don't remember anything of the three hour oration by Edward Everett that followed it.  Still, it seems to me that prayer should not really be used as showmanship, no matter how talented the orator. (2) While we usually give a cursory nod to ado...

 In previous posts I have been compelled to disclaim my own expertise in a variety of areas.  It is now more vital than ever that I do so.  While this blog has looked at my personal spiritual journey over the course of the preceding 40 years, from here on out I shall be focusing on a path of that journey on which I have trodden for less than a month.  If this particular level of enlightenment has a post-graduate level, then I am currently enrolled in Pre-K. We shall look deeper into the matters discussed in my last couple of posts, but first, some amplification regarding my continued references to East v. West.  As I have stated several times now, I have recently found myself thwarted in my progression by an apparent lack of teachers.  It seems I have climbed as far as I could by following the spiritual guides I could conveniently find, and have of late been looking for new teachers.  Ironically, my search for new teachers has led me to some very old t...

Throughout this blog, I have continuously iterated what I believe is the need to approach Christianity, or any philosophy, intellectually.  I have also made a few comments that would seem to contradict this idea; to wit, that reasoning has it's limits, that pride gets in the way of everything, and that eastern philosophies - including Christianity - have been tainted by Western thought.  In this essay, I will begin the process of trying to explain these seeming incongruities, and the convergence commences, oddly enough, by looking at the concept of bullying. Before even that, however, I must reiterate a point I have made so often throughout this blog: I am not a trained psychologist.  I took one 3-hour course in psychology in college in which I made a B.  Of the professional psychologists and psychotherapists I have known, I didn't even like most of them, much less trust their learned opinions.  What is to follow are simply the observations of one man who spent ...