This evening I found myself drawn into a conversation about religion. During much of the conversation, I tried as much as possible to maintain a respectful silence, knowing that we were wading into dangerous waters.<\/p>\n
Yet I came to understand, as I navigated the dangerous shoals of someone else’s fraught and intense description of their lifelong spiritual journey, that there was a deep schism between the intellectual and the emotional sides of what I was hearing.<\/p>\n
You can make all the intellectual arguments you want for or against a particular religious view of the world around you. And there’s nothing wrong with that. One could easily build several worthwhile and intellectual exciting university courses around this very topic.<\/p>\n
But the hold of a religion upon the minds of those who were raised with it is something else entirely. It is not a question of right or wrong, of logic or of deductive inference.<\/p>\n
No, it’s much wilder than that, both fiercer and more intense. As far as I can tell, people carry with them the religion of their childhood — seared into their minds at some deep level — even long after they may have renounced that religion. We can argue all day about God, but the bedrock emotional truth is this:<\/p>\n
You do not possess the religion you grew up with. It possesses you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This evening I found myself drawn into a conversation about religion. During much of the conversation, I tried as much as possible to maintain a respectful silence, knowing that we were wading into dangerous waters. Yet I came to understand, as I navigated the dangerous shoals of someone else’s fraught and intense description of their … Continue reading “Religious discussions”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8307"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8307"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8311,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8307\/revisions\/8311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}