In years past, for most of my adult life, I was no longer participating in organized religion in any active sense. My early career took me to various locations across the country – it removed the pressure I might have felt to attend my home church. I still had religion-centric thought patterns, but I was thinking more about how there could not possibly be just one correct church or denomination. In grandiose fashion, I imagined that although no one branch of Christianity was likely to have the complete, correct doctrine, hopefully all Christians – from Catholics to Primitive Baptists, were all basically worshipping the same god and the same savior. I didn’t stop to consider the validity of any non-Christian faith…that was territory I wasn’t ready to consider. Closely scrutinizing one set of dogma versus another seemed needlessly tedious, I felt, so i began to think in terms of the big picture; from there I would work my way back down to my own common experience. Looking at the BIG PICTURE, for me, turned out to be a positive move, and would fuel my appetite to seek out and read the thoughts of other intellects who had already traveled this ground.
