ItalianTruthSeeker

One of the most common threads between religions, or, rather, between the original hard-core pure and pristine kernels of various religions, is this idea that the world, or what's quote-unquote "normal" or mainstream, is an illusion. Jesus Christ said that Christians must be "no part of the world" and another Bible verse says that "the world is passing away and so is its desire but he that does the will of God remains forever", hence the will of God and the world don't match and so when the original teachings of Christianity go mainstream they get corrupted. Interestingly Jesus was not the only one who said that true spirituality and the world don't match. Lao Tsu said something along the lines of "a human being's essential nature is perfect and faultless, but after years of immersion in the world we took on a counterfeit nature". The Zen Buddhists say that humans lost their "original face" or "Buddha nature",

One of the ways to look at science is the following: one makes a claim and then gives people a method to test said claim. Now, I could make the claim that God exists and give people the following method to test my claim: pray to God according to His will and He will answer that prayer...and by the way this is a claim that the Bible makes. Have you ever tested this method? Most scientifically-minded people would laugh at this method and would never even bother to test it. But does the fact that most people refuse to use this method invalidate both the method and the claim?

College can teach some academic and armchair theology but it cannot teach such things as how to love, how to forgive, how to empathize with others, how to have great relationships, how to raise children and yet these are the most fundamental things in life. This is why there are religious groups that discourage going to college, precisely because divine education is far superior and transformational 

There is no denying that a lot of the things that Jesus said, that King David said, that King Solomon said and other Bible writers said qualifies as cutting-edge psychology and can be used to heal oneself and others, to improve relationships, achieve mental peace and so on. For example, a passage in the book of James reads: "every man must be swift about hearing and slow about speaking". This short sentence gets to the core of how effective communication works. Another example of cutting-edge psychology is in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus explained why people project their weaknesses onto others, by pointing to our tendency to overlook the rafter in our own eye while demonizing the straw in other people's eye. Another remarkable piece of wisdom is the idea that instead of rendering evil for evil we'd better conquer evil with acts of kindness, as treating someone who is treating us lousy in a kind way buys a lot. And the list could go on for hours. So it might s

Is reality rational or is it perhaps that humans project their need to grasp and manipulate reality, using their finite methods, onto a reality that is spiritual and not rational? Is believing in miracles irrational? Well, what is a miracle but any aspect of reality that we cannot understand how it works? If a modern i-pad was brought back to the time of the cavemen how would they view that gadget? Wouldn't they view it as a miracle? And wouldn't they label as irrational or crazy one who actually saw said i-pad and went around claiming that he saw it?

One of the points that scientifically-minded people like to make to dismiss religion and spirituality is that science is hard and tangible while spirituality is girly-fluffy and fuzzy. The reality is that our lives, including the lives of the most hard-nosed scientifically-minded people, are mostly run by things that are quote-unquote "fuzzy". For example many scientists, including the most atheistically-minded ones, are married. How come they are married? Because somewhere along the line they fell in love with their present spouse. And what's hard and tangible about the feeling of love? Our lives are run by feelings, thoughts, ideas and emotions, and all of this stuff is girly-fluffy and fuzzy, there is nothing tangible about these things...and yet all of us consider these things to be very real and stake our lives on these things...

I recently stumbled upon a very interesting quote that goes something like "the better the model the bigger the problem". Science is in the business of creating models of the actual reality or the raw truth, or reality the way it actually is. These models allow us to manipulate reality rather effectively and create technology that massively improves our lives. But science has become so effective in creating these models that it has lost touch with the actual raw reality that these models and maps are supposed to encapsulate. And, because reality is bigger than any models that finite humans can come up with, it turns out that there are issues that those finite methods, maps and models will never be able to resolve. And the most fundamental issue of all is: is there a God who has been existing from time indefinite and will continue to exist to time indefinite? Science and its finite maps and models is in no position to tell...and never will because, as it turns out, our finite