Recovery

It's been two months, my only new years resolution is to write in this every Tuesday morning.
I had a realization last night, I am a recovering fundamentalist. Between 1999 and roughly 2004 I went all out with my Christian faith, in how I thought it was supposed to be practiced. Which would be the Christianity of Spurgeon, Robert Murray McCheyne, Lewis, and modern teachings of that sort. With hindsight, I would say I ignored reason and objectivity and just went 'balls to the wall'. God and Jesus were all I cared about, and figuring out how to live life for them was my goal. From the position I am in now, I am amazed that I was able to be freed from that. It's hard when I think about it, and I have a lot of mixed emotions about it. I will admit, it was good times, the travels, and the peace in thinking you understand how the universe works was comforting.
I obviously still have aspects of that time still working in me, one is the need to proselytize whatever I think is important. I'm fairly social anyways, so it's hard to just let things slide.
Not everything I learned during that period was of no use, and it did teach some valuable lessons. Moving on from then has been hard, and understanding from the few very close to me has helped. Some of the fundamentalist teachings can be good, think sermon on the mount variety, but a lot of it can also be very very harmful.
Moving on from here, something that I want to work on more in how I view the world is summed up in the famous quote from Spinoza,
"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."
S.
Oh, and I am super stoked that my brother and sister in law both got me a subscription to Skeptic.