What Does Critical Thinking Mean To You?

Critical thinking is what leads to faith in the right things.

Of course I wasn't defining it, just stating what I knew to be contrary to the prevailing EvC opinion. There's no point in the likes of me trying to define critical thinking or anything else at this forum. Or saying anything at all for that matter.

That would take me back to the two most intense years of my life during which I was reading voraciously about all the religions and occultic practices. That led me into "spiritual" experiences of a very intense sort, some beautiful, some scary. I'd been a self proclaimed atheist, suddenly found some Hindu gurus' descriptions of their experiences of "God" very convincing. Went on a quest to learn about God. Long story short it was Christianity and Christianity alone that explained all that and showed me the way out of it. Not sure I'm up to trying to analyze all that for you.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I could get interested in such a question but not in an environment where I'm surrounded by people who've decided a priori that I'm stupid because I'm a creationist and believe in God.

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.

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.

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.

Not with what is usually understood to be a psychosis, which involves disorganized thoughts among other things -- according to internet sources I looked up. If a psychosis is defined simply by the unusual experiences that kind of begs the question.

I've never had the experience of casting out demons but have heard and read about them. From what you've said yours sounds like the real thing. Hair standing on end is a standard experience in the presence of demons. The hair on the back of my neck was standing up after I'd had that apparition in my room threatening me. I'd blurted out a phrase I'd learned from a member of a Christian cult and it had disappeared but the sensation on the back of my neck lingered.Such phenomena are normally explained away by modern psychology but I think THAT's the prejudicial thinking. If you take all the evidence into account I think it's fair to conclude we're talking about real spiritual beings, i.e., demons. At the time I didn't know what to make of the half angel, half devil apparition my friend had told me about, or the apparition of her Zen teacher sitting at the foot of her bed that the other friend had told me about, but putting it together with my own experiences and the experiences of demons described in the Bible, and books about such things, it seems to me you have to be led to the conclusion that these things are not hallucinations, not products of your own mind, but real. SOMETIMES they could be hallucinations or even fraud of course, but the ones we're discussing here aren't like that.

Oh I do not think so. Where do you get your certainty?

Years after the experiences I described I was visiting a charismatic Christian commune and woke up in the middle of the night with the sensation of an evil presence gripping my throat and trying to strangle me. I thought the words "I'm covered by the blood of Jesus" and it went away.

Seems to me the confirmation bias is very often on the side of the debunkers. They DON'T want to believe in the reality of these things, they NEED to believe that the mind does it all, that it's a hallucination or a psychosis, it freaks them out to think things aren't quite as "science" tells them they are. The clue is the kneejerk certainty. It takes some real critical thought to sort some of this stuff out. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Which was my point. That it's the debunkers like you who have the kneejerk certainty.

Sounds to me like you have a serious inability to think critically, meaning an inability to distinguish between mental illness and experiences of real spirits. People believing they are Jesus Christ is a mental illness. Nothing anyone has described here is in such a category. And yes you believe what you WANT to believe, regardless of the actual evidence.

And you are wrong about that, and unable to recognize how your own opinions rest on bias and belief.