Ways of Living

Table of Contents

      How should one live their life?  Our lives are so short.  We seem to pass through it with hardly a thought, living each day sometimes automatically, going through our life on auto-drive with little thought as to how we should live it.  Or perhaps I do us all an injustice; perhaps we do think of such things to varying extents, but finding no definite answer to this slippery question, we tend to shelf it and proceed on.  Through the ages people have considered these and deeper questions.

 I was born and raised a Southern Baptist.  Many, outside the South, may raise their eyes with visions of fundamentalist conservatives, perhaps bigoted and narrow-minded.  I see such misapprehensions portrayed in the media and have to shake my head at their own bigotry and ignorance.  I believe that bigots and narrow-mindedness occur in all groups not the least in the public media.  Yes, I am sure that you could find a few  such people  in this church, but I have to say that I have almost never noticed such things in my personal dealings with them, and have never encountered any extreme form of it.  Without exception I found Baptists to be kind and caring people, very, very different from what is portrayed in the media which seems to have colored people's minds.  The same is true of all the other denominations that I have known.

    Each Baptist church is its own entity, beholding to no higher authority except to God.  Beyond a few basic tenets each is free to believe pretty much as it wishes (see recent split and the emergence of the Baptist General Convention of Texas).

    There must have been something in my religious upbringing that made me suspicious of dictates from above.   Also, I was raised to question authority...to look behind the various dogmas that surround us and to question the "why" behind them.  Sometimes I found good reasons for a belief, and at other times I found that there weren't enough good reasons to support a particular accepted "truth."  In other words somehow I was raised to question.  This led me down many paths...some alternative paths are presented here.

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