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regardless of what ever religious or spiritual path you follow, how do you determine or validate its value in your life? how do you gauge whether it is safe, helpful, wise, valuable? what influences you...is it the leader? the followers? the book? the ideology? how do you keep yourself and your loved ones safe? how do you discern and test the wisdom and helpful guidance that could improve your life, versus guidance that might be harmful?
as always, looking forward to your input, thank you everyone for contributing
Does it bring me Joy...does it help me become kinder, more patient and clear.
Does it bring me closer to the Lord...filling me with His strength, love, confidence, fearlessness, and wisdom!
If it didn't well, why would I waste time with it?
A person must value all of the above, tho, above anything else...above pride,
above shame, above anger... above all the ego's tricks...
so that they can gauge from the depths of their heart.
In my case because I live in a very rural area and during the frequent harsh weather am unable to leave the house, I follow a religion that does not require any leader, group study or interaction with other members.
It is a way of life and as such one in which I find comfort in and security. My wife and myself live at least 100 miles away from any other person that shares our religion. Most if not all of our friends follow the traditional native American (Lakotah) beliefs. We respect them they respect us. No issues over religious differences have arisen.
I find that my religious following does encourage peaceful coexistence among people of different faiths.
In my case the spiritual search took the form of emotional healing. There were also some heavy questions I had regarding people I loved who had been through too much in life and no matter what I read or who I spoke to, it still didn't give me the much needed feeling that life is fair and God loves us all the same and felt like rebelling against God and the lack of sense of things for many years in my life, or denying that there is a God.
It was a gradual process that culminated with my instant emotional healing when one night I had a dream about Jesus Christ who was holding my hands, and a few years later, when I joined a spiritual school and I was suddenly able to understand why certain things had happened and why some people I loved very much had to suffer. It was like a much needed personal revelation I had waited for many years, when I was able to understand that Life and the Universe are fair, that there is a sense, even if I could only do that from the limited point of view of my personal experiences. Mysterious are the ways...The peace and joy I found then still join me and applying the spritual values in my life proves to be the right way to live every time, even if I also fail sometimes and I still have a long way to go.
Last edited by BlazingStars; 06-22-2015 at 11:56 AM..
Because of Jesus I have a relationship with God via the Holy Spiit , so the value is infanent, not merely temperal.
Though through His Spirit I am taught from the things Jesus said , there is much more about the past and the future God reveals, as well as guidance in every days life.
And what is not reveald emediately, is revealed at the time it is necesssary to know it, and act on current information.
Similliar cercumstances do not always call for the same solution , so I must have His guidance for each chalange.
I am giuided in interseeding for others and taught how to pray for those in need, in spicifics.
It is so wonderful to see folks healed on the spot and see lives changed ,as they discover God's interest in them.
Like a plant , some grow and seek God more thuroughly and develop and mature and learn to be obedient to God in a love for Him and respect. These need no coaching from me or any one but God, they have a relationship.
Some have the keys and a spark ,but they are afraid to us the keys to open the door into that relationship.
I merely try to show them the relationship is part of the package ,it is important to explore.
Every day life is always a gift and a challange too ,and I am blessed more than I diserve.
My philosiphy of life is this .
It all belongs to God ,
and though I have His directive to embrace it and live it, my best option is to have His instruction in how to live it to the fullest and become useful on an eternal basis.
It was a relief when I lost my faith in the nasty 'born again' dogma by the time I was 19. I don't need some entity outside of myself, or anyone else for that matter to look up to!
regardless of what ever religious or spiritual path you follow, how do you determine or validate its value in your life? how do you gauge whether it is safe, helpful, wise, valuable? what influences you...is it the leader? the followers? the book? the ideology? how do you keep yourself and your loved ones safe? how do you discern and test the wisdom and helpful guidance that could improve your life, versus guidance that might be harmful?
as always, looking forward to your input, thank you everyone for contributing
All I care about is that my beliefs about life have predictive and explanatory power concerning how, in reality, I actually experience life. In other words I am interested in minimizing cognitive dissonance.
Since I experience life exactly as you would expect to if the universe were indifferent to you, owed you nothing, and simply is what it appears to be, I have come to believe that those things are the truest conceptual model for life. Since religion never invents anything useful or innovates around anything, and science and technology deliver on those things in spades, I tend to have far more confidence in education, rationalism, empiricism, and the scientific method than in any sort of religious sentiment, to produce things that have the potential to reduce human suffering and drudgery and increase personal freedom. I also believe that humans are capable of doing good in the world without imagining that they need some external force to guide and support them.
I keep myself and loved ones safe, imperfectly, by being my best self, being responsible and competent in delivering valuable skills that command a good living, and being disciplined around health and nutrition, a safe driver, and so forth. Always recognizing that any of it can be lost to me for any random reason at any time, helps me to stay in the present moment, savoring it as the treasure that it is. I do a pretty good job of living regret-free. Right now my wife and stepson are still asleep, and if I were to find them both dead this morning there would literally be nothing left unsaid or undone between us.
Well here's a shocker. I suffer from severe depression. I'm sure most people in my predicament do.
There is one bonus for those of us with depression -- we tend to see the world how it really IS rather than fooling ourselves into seeing a world that we want it to be. I've said somewhere else that happiness is often achieved through the art of self-delusion. Those of us who are depressed simply can't do that. Maybe that's why we're depressed. The world quite often is not a pretty place.
Yes, there is proof of this but I can't link to anything because the studies are in peer reviewed journals and unavailable online without paying a subscription fee for Lexus Nexus or something similar. But I've read them since, being depressed, I was curious.
Ergo, I often judge its value by whether or not it's actually real. If it's just someone blowing sunshine up my ass, I walk away. And there's plenty of that going around. Some people can take comfort in unreal things like gods and saviors and messiahs ... but I see through the smoke as if it weren't even there.
It has to be real and it has to make sense. As mordant pointed out, things that eliminate cognitive dissonance are what I'm all about.
I follow the path I do in the hope it will further my knowledge and understanding of life, thus leading to a deeper appreciation of same.
So far, so good. All I need is a few more centuries.
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