Hello, Red. Your mention of 'spiritual Alka-Seltzer' is right on target in view of the difficulty of digesting some of the stuff we were force fed!
YoYo:
I was sincere in my question. You may or may not have noticed many of my posts but if you do, you'll find that I'm one of the few people here who still believes in God. I am looking for truth...honestly. I have no agenda other than seeking what man has sought from the beginning: A purpose for this life. Like a lot of other people here my anger at having been deceived sometimes shows through and I'm sure that at times I may hurt someone's feelings and I am truly sorry for this. I feel betrayed. I was led to believe that these men were direct and exclusive recipients of God's holy spirit. I should have read the Scriptures more carefully but then I was told early on that the Bible had not been written for me to understand and that apart from this exclusive group, no one on earth could understand it. When I saw things in the Scriptures that contradicted the man-made rules, I attributed this to my own ignorance and lack of the all important factor of holy spirit in understanding it.
I ran across some of Tolstoy's writings a while back and I was stunned at what I read. He was talking about the government here but please note carefully to see if you can find another application:
:::"How does it happen," they inquired, "that the government [which according to their ideas cannot do wrong] sends the army to war and orders criminals to be executed." When I answered that the government does wrong in giving such orders, the peasants fell into still greater confusion, and either broke off the conversation or else got angry with me.
"They must have found a law for it. The archbishops know as much about it as we do, I should hope," a Russian soldier once observed to me. And in saying his the soldier obviously set his mind at rest, in the full conviction that his spiritual guides had found a law which authorized his ancestors, and the tzars and their descendants, and millions of men, to serve as he was doing himself, and that the question I had put him was a kind of hoax or conundrum on my part.
Men see that there is some inconsistency here, but not being able to analyze it, involuntarily assume that this apparent inconsistency is only the result of their ignorance. The very grossness and obviousness of the inconsistency confirms them in this conviction.::: -Tolstoy
When I first read this it almost took my breath away. Here was a man that lived and died before I was born and he had put on paper a simple truth that had eluded me for a long time. And so I came to realize again the importance of being informed and well-read. I came to realize again the importance of non-isolationism. It re-affirmed what I had come to accept as a profound truth: Truth has nothing to fear from scrutiny, on the contrary, truth is vindicated by it. Only falsehoods and half-truths need to tremble as the light of discovery sweeps toward them.