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Hi! I’m Tom, and at age 76, after a lifetime as a science-oriented person with some compassionate contempt for religion, I’m regretting my confirmed atheism since about age 4. Back then, having learned to read at age 3, I enthusiastically worked on learning everything I could from the most realistic reporting I could find (loved National Geographic mags!). And I judged what I read (or was told) by systems thinking, which I strongly suspect is instinctive, though now repressed by our ruling classes, who want us to just take their word for (often self-contradictory) official reality instead of checking it out for ourselves. But for me it is vital to check the credibility of the way claimed “facts” link up with observable reality (or at least with other credibly reported facts), though I didn’t hear that “systems thinking” term for decades. Having heard lots of news on the radio (pre-TV years), I also heard lots of preaching on Sundays, from guys who sounded completely convinced of the reality and huge importance of what they were saying. Though my parents weren’t really religious, they didn’t talk it down. But then came an afternoon when I got left in a daycare center in a church, where I found boredom in the room with blocks and young kids, but books, including Bibles, in the main room. And started to read. And got stopped by 2 or 3 of the folks in charge of the premises, though I think I made a good case that I was really interested, and in no way a threat of damage to anything. Their denial of this urge was so completely incompatible with the enthusiasm of the radio preachers about the importance of the Bible and having people pay attention to it that I quickly decided that the weird stories were just that: weird stories like those in a lot of kids’ books. But with advancing years, I realized that we humans are both egotistical and self-blinded to reality in many ways. And the the Bible (and other religions) still looked so bad to me because they clearly featured stories designed to enforce a hierarchy of human rulers on those dumb enough to take its stories as fully factual, rather than purposefully distorted history designed to place a sort of holy halo over the heads of those rulers. But after enough years I began to see how limited our worldviews really are, and how difficult it is to imagine the way that actual reality surely exceeds our limited human (modern chimp) ability to perceive or understand it. And I started to wonder about all the unknown unknowns, especially including the increasing number of hard-to-explain coincidences that kept on piling up in my experience. I could spend a lot more words on the development of my thinking here, but what it comes down to is that I suspect there’s a lot more reality behind some religious or spiritual thought than I ever recognized. And I can logically justify that suspicion. So I was quite happy to run across this online treatment of Kabbalah (my wife has a lot of books on it), which seems to emphasize understanding reality rather than just worshiping highly questionable human rulers as representatives of some Higher Powers. The difficult part now is that my life has somehow become so busy that even in retirement I just can’t manage to connect with scheduled events like the featured presentations here, with any reliable timeliness, so I’ll have to mostly just view bygone lessons and discussions and do what I can with them. In any case, from what I’ve already seen, many thanks for what you’re doing here!
