Are You a Devoutly Religious Person?

by TerryWalstrom 2 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  TerryWalstrom

  ARE YOU A DEVOUTLY RELIGIOUS PERSON?

  If, yes--this is for you.
  ______
  INTELLECTUAL HONESTY is a willingness to be wrong when facts and evidence clash with beliefs.
  Lacking NEUTRAL OBJECTIVITY, people can’t really listen! They defensively filter anything which clashes with belief.
  _____
  Some people don't listen because they are waiting for you to shut up SO THEY CAN SET YOU STRAIGHT.
  ________
  True Believers refuse to read anything that disagrees with their worldview, to them, open-mindedness is weakness and disloyalty.
  ________
  I'm talking to you if you're like that, because-- I was you.

  Over the years, as a Jehovah's Witness I was impossible to reason with. Even after I left the Organization, I was obstinate, argumentative, and mean-spirited.
  It takes years to mellow, to listen, to come to the jarring realization MY OPINIONS have zero value in making this world a better place.

  Strong opinions separate people from each other. Knowing when to keep my opinion to myself is the hardest life lesson a person like me can learn.

  What is required, is a CALL to ACTION at the end of an opinion, as you'll now see...

  
  AND NOW, A TWIST ENDING!
  You didn’t see this one coming...read on!

  Political Beliefs are not substantively different from Religious orthodoxy.
  Political Hardliners can be narrow-minded and defensive/offensive as religious ones.
  Pointing your finger and telling others how wrong they are is not only rude, egotistical, obnoxious, but immoral too.

  Emotional orthodoxy is poisonous oppression.
  There is a reason why Religion and Politics are constantly mentioned in the same breath: mean-spiritedness soon appears.
  _____
  Both are BELIEFS because you don't try to disconfirm them without outside evidence.
  Your opinion is not TRUTH; truth corresponds to reality: the way things really are rather than how we desire them to be.

  “True Believers” are often what is wrong with our world because they are absolutely impossible to reason or deal with--so eager are they to have their way become the ONLY way. Often this ends in violence.

  Why am I telling you this? Is it to “wake you up?”
  No.
  ____
  BELIEF is hard-wired and baked into certain people’s personality.
  It is part of the variety of nature.
  I just want you to reckon with self-awareness as to what you are doing to yourself and others.
  You CAN moderate your behavior. You won't be able to change it.
  _____
  Are you Politic-o-holic?
  Can you just not shut up about the recent election, for instance?

  Wake up! You aren't going to change anybody with your rants. What you are going to do is change public discourse into hatred and poison.
  Why would you do that?

  You are losing friends and loved ones---is it worth it just running off at the mouth with negative comments day and night week in and week out?

  Remember: INTELLECTUAL HONESTY is a willingness to be wrong rather than an insistence on being right.

  Lacking NEUTRAL OBJECTIVITY, political people can’t really listen at all--because they just know they are right.
  _____

  BEWARE of ideology if it is making you obnoxious and irrepressible. Try to listen. Try to change your openness to the ideas and opinions of others.

  We all live together. Why make each other uncomfortable, defensive, emotional and resentful?

  You can make a difference in this world--sometimes--just by shutting the hell up:)
  (If that is what it takes)
  
  ________
  https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/how-do-you-distinguish-between-religious-fervor-and-mental-illness/
• 

  cha ching

  Excellent observations! Thx, Terry!
• 

  SAHS

  The various twists and turns among the different sides playing out in the big political arena is like a kind of higher-level process of “evolution” in itself.

  The incessant stirrings of the left-wing, right-wing, liberal, conservative, democrat, republican, socialist, environmental, independent, etc., etc. – they’re are all like the components and constituents of the colossal aggregate of human ideologies coexisting and subtly morphing within a humongous “test tube” of human sociopolitical evolution – slowly being whirled around in that giant test tube in a manner reminiscent of whatever gradual set of processes of auto replicating and self-improving genetic cypher (DNA information) which ever so gradually and imperceptibly unfolded to conjure up the present state of biological evolution.

  But what is to come out of this higher–level outworking of evolution in the sociopolitical landscape? Well, I believe that whatever gains ascendency within that anthropological realm must, out of logical necessity, be not so much the “strongest” but the “best” in terms of what “works out” in the most practical efficacy of human society as a whole.

  Kind of similar to what has had to come out of the more classic biological evolution of life itself on this planet: It’s not so much what we may think of as the “strongest” – or “fittest” – but, rather, whatever happens to be the “best” toward the general efficacy of the continuing and improving propagation of the relentless juggernaut of life throughout the all-encompassing “tree” of the origins of all species.

  But in the case of the human sociopolitical landscape, things tend to eventually “work out” within the balancing of societal forces toward whatever necessitates the continued – and hopefully refining of – propagation of the human species, and the society in which they cohabitate.

  Simply put: It will (and must) “all come out in the wash.” So, no worries. The “good” will prevail. It must. After all, considering what we have seen in physical biological evolution, it’s a logical imperative!