What Does Critical Thinking Mean To You?

I can respect that. If nothing else, hopefully this thread will cause you to spend some time reflecting on these questions.

I think I can speak for most the people here, you are certainly not considered stupid bur rather intentionally evasive. Have you considered a career in law or politics?
I believe in God, but I also know creationism is an insult to both God and humanity. Why you may ask?Because I believe in the works of God over the words of men.To me, the sole route to knowing the mind of God is through the study of nature, given the gifts the deity has bestowed -- mathematics and natural science.That being said, let's get back to the actual topic of this thread.
Over the years, I have found that teaching by example is best.Therefore I humbly provide you with some examples of what I think critical thinking means:
I do not know for certain if what I experience is a reasonable model of reality, my senses may be limited or I may even be part of a computer simulation.
I do not know if mathematics is from some eternal truth about the universe, or if it is a form of shorthand invented by humans in order to have a language to discuss reality.
I do not know if Faith is a real person or a creation of Percy to simply keep this website going.
I do not know if God exists, or is a fiction born of authority, from parent to state. What I do know is there appears to be a general human need to believe in something greater than themselves, be it true or not.All I have, and for that matter, all anyone has, is evidence, for or against, objective or subjective.
I believe in God and here is a decent excuse from the poet Keats - 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
I simply agree with the first part, and totally disagree with the second. As Dean of Libraries, my job is to know as much as possible.So, in the end Faith, stop playing the martyr card, it is beneath you.

Your join date is displayed under your avatar. You've been a member at EvC since December 29, 2003 - a few days more than since 2004. Critical thinking is deliberate; it's honest; it's a search for the truth and not for confirmation.It's our best effort at honesty with ourselves.What does it mean to you? Absolutely!

Well, it's true I'm no shrinking violet but sometimes the kindness of strangers that sustained Blanche is a nice experience. Interesting. I'm finding out recently many here say they believe in God of whom I never would have suspected it. But of course in some cases it's not the God of the Bible but a generic God who in your case rejects His own written word in which His Creation and worldwide Flood are clearly described. Ya know, it's only an insult because you believe in evolution. That's the whole of it. Of course you think it's supported by evidence. Oh well. Yeah, that's a theme here. As if God's works didn't need interpretation, for which all we have is our fallen human minds, and being mute are harder to understand than anything written. Now if there WAS a worldwide Flood, which I happen to see everywhere in Nature, you'd miss it, wouldn't you? And that's because you AREN'T just looking at Nature but accepting theories about Nature that debunk the Flood, making you blind to the evidence I see. Critical thinking applied to the Biblical revelation is what allows me to see it. I can accept those as gifts of God, and Nature as a source of knowledge of God, but do you discover through these things anything about sin and redemption, damnation and Hell, the need for a Savior and God's provision of same? Of course not, and since you don't you probably prefer not to know about any of that either. One thing that made me very happy when I finally became a Christian was its wonderful down to earth common sense. I'm no computer simulation, I'm a created being whose judgments MUST be limited because I'm fallen, but God's word is a lamp in the darkness.Critical thinking tells me to trust God's word and the results confirm the value of this over and over. What God's word tells me about God's world is that although I'm personally mathematics-challenged mathematics has got to reflect that eternal truth about the Creation, and God Himself in the end.Again, I believe trusting God's word is required by accurate critical thought. Both, as I'm quite well aware this time around, and I don't mind my role as stirrer of the pot and perennial target overall. But for some reason I'm sure anglagard is a real person. I think I arrive at this by the application of critical thought to lots of experience of people. I could never have believed in God without the attestations of the Bible and thousands of books and sermons by believers in its revelations. We were made to worship, that I believe too, but I would never have found an acceptable Object of worship without these attestations. I think critical thinking was a guide to it all too. It led me through many unsatisfactory ideas about God to the Truth. But as scripture says, since our minds are fallen and by nature we are at enmity with God because we like sin, it's God's Spirit who really guides us to the Truth, and I accept that and am grateful. Again, the sad thing is that there is no route to a knowledge of salvation through Christ by any means other than the Bible.

After having a few subjective experiences, I no longer doubt that God exists...though I continually question. I admit to a degree of confirmation bias, for I have no desire to challenge my belief. Fortunately, others do so for me...they frame the issues, questions, and doubts. If you were like me, I only gave validity to my spiritual experiences because they each impacted me above the norm.

Enough of mine were scary (the world turning gray all of a sudden and people and animals moving in slow motion with eyes full of hatred; the sense of invisible evil presences at times; the appearance of a spirit in my room threatening me) to keep me from desiring them. They would just happen to me out of the blue. Others were beautiful though, and none of them lasted long.In retrospect I came to think they occurred because of the intensity of my search and the emotions it was raising in me to be believing in God of all things after thirty years of considering myself an atheist. I didn't believe in Christ during that period, just a generic "God" that I thought of as being the same God worshipped by all the religions, although since I'd been sent to church as a child my ideas of God came from that experience.I'd never learned the gospel from that childhood experience, but when I had scary experiences I would recite what little I could remember of the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm, and that was VERY little, but it got me through it.I had no idea of the reality of Satan and occultic evil, which is what I later realized I was experiencing, certainly not God. When I think of all that now I wonder how I did get through it, but there was so much happening, and through it all I was continuing to read and discover, that I didn't get stuck in any particular point of view or experience.It took two years of reading and strange experiences before I became a believer in Christ and that wasn't so much through experience as through learning the Bible and Christian doctrine. The experiences overall proved to me that there is definitely another realm of human experience, a "spiritual" realm, and it gave quite a bit of substance to my understanding of what Christ came to save us from.

I think you're describing a psychosis, not a 'spiritual realm' - it sounds like you were going through a quite prolonged period of intense mental imbalance.If there's a single benefit for religious fundamentalism, it's its ability to stabilise an unbalanced mind - but it does it at huge cost.

But I was perfectly functional in my normal life. The experiences were strictly a result of what I was reading about religion, which was intensely exciting, and confined to the times I spent on those subjects. But yes such experiences could LEAD to a psychosis I suppose, if they became prolonged or a person reacted too fearfully.Most people have spiritual experiences in the context of some kind of spiritual discipline but mine were happening just from reading and thinking intensely about such things. My Zen friend told me of some scary experiences she had had in meditation, and she had a Roshi to advise her about them. At least I had her to talk to, but I didn't feel any great need to talk, it was just interesting.During that period, because I was open to such things, I heard about a lot of experiences people don't normally talk about. Such as the appearance of an apparition that looked like those spirits in Asian religion that are half angel, half devil. Such as an unseen hand pulling someone back from the path of a speeding car. Such as dreams becoming reality. Such as objects moving from one place to another. Such as a woman who said she could kill cockroaches with her concentrated mind, which she practiced as a form of meditation. Such as a person's hand taking on the appearance of a dragon's claw in meditation, an image she couldn't shake for hours despite consulting with her advisor. Such as the apparition of a recently dead spiritual advisor sitting at the foot of a meditator's bed.None of these people was psychotic, all lived in the real world and nobody would have known of any of these things normally.However, such experiences made me aware that what is often thought of as psychosis may in fact be a spiritual/occultic experience that isn't recognized because people don't believe in those things. Anyway I was completely on my own with them and able to have perfectly normal conversations and other dealings with people.ABE: Interestingly, it was later when my interests were turning toward Biblical Christianity that some of my friends asked me if I was eating right, getting enough sleep, undergoing some kind of stress etc. Such is the prejudice against traditional religion. Could think of that as pretty funny really.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Its still possible for you to function normally even if you have a psychosis.

Do you consider that to be critical thinking?

I had what would be described as a hallucination. The thing is, there were others present who also heard the voices. We were praying for a guy when all of a sudden we heard a multitude of voices screaming "the blood! the blood! no, no, not the blood!"It so freaked us out that we were all on our faces praying and shaking. Never in my life will I forget that experience. Of course any good critical thinker would at least try and explain it another way than would a fundamentalist, but I thus far have found no other plausible explanations for the event.

I suppose that by definition I should seek any and all ways to either disprove my initial conclusion or hypothesize another reason...so in that light I would better use critical thinking as an explanation.

I will grant that I had seen charismatic fundamentalists (of which I was a part) ritualize the casting out of demons. I will say that of the events I witnessed, many could be said to be hyper emotional and based on confirmation bias in regards to the reactions of the audience. The event happened away from a controlled setting--at my apartment. The ones present were all believers, so that could influence perception and interpretation, I suppose. James Randi was not present. I will swear, however, that my hair on my arms literally was on end and a static electrical feeling coupled with anxiety was noted. I also recall very vividly that the voices were not coming from any hidden recording device and that they had a sound that could not be reproduced by another human. I am 90% certain that my friends did not trick me.

That is indeed sad, which prompts some of us to think critically about it. Would a God really create such a sad situation? Or maybe some humans just like to create sad situations and blame them on God.

Oh, man, I've tripped my balls off!One time, I was sober, I was woken up in the middle of the night by some deep raspy voice speaking some weird foreign language. After I woke up, I could still hear the voice. It was coming from right above me. I sounded like some demonic spell or something. Like an incantation. Scared the shit out of me.I sat up in bed and looked around for the source, but couldn't find one. It eventually stopped talking and that was that.Like I said, I've tripped plenty of times. I know hallucinations that are happening "in my head". And this voice was convincingly not in my head. I heard it from outside with my ears (as opposed to that voice we all hear in our heads).I have no idea what the fuck that was.