This touches on a… what’s the word… far reaching interpretation of spiritual things. How far is pentecostalism detached from reality? When does the Spirit enter into the field of psychology? It’s evident from where I’m standing this happens. And it’s evident to many believers as well. Craig Keener’s book Impossible Love comes to mind. I’m unsure how relevant it is, but it’s a remarkable book, and he is a pretty remarkable person.
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I took “decision” to refer to be a conscious deliberative affair and your subsequent description confirms this (in which case I only reiterate even more strongly my assertion that not all choices are “decisions”). Not all choices are about looking for reasons for one alternative rather than another. Some are a matter of reaching down into your body or unconscious for things which are already determined there. Remember there are the recent experiments which show that choices can be made even before we are aware of them. I refute the idea that this means they are not choices at all, but agree they are not a matter of deliberative decisions. Everything points to choices being a far more complicated process than your “choice is a decision” declaration as an absolute which we must all bow down to.
I have learned long ago not to equate my own experiences with the totality of reality and not to project my own way of doing things onto other people like a sample of one is sufficient to define the species.
Perhaps that is the way things work with you. But I see zero evidence that this is how it works with all people.
Here you go again, trying to pick a fight with a complete stranger. It is not making the things you say even a tiny bit more interesting.
This piece of woo is either a lot of imaginative fantasy OR… it is just words, in which case I agree that the words we use can be very helpful (but not always the same words to different people, however).
I took that to be a union of topics rather than an intersection. Otherwise I would have left the topic to the bio-chemists.
Insightfulness is a highly subjective judgement. Are people supposed to see your “insight” when you cannot see that of other people?
I didn’t approach you.
I don’t recall ever agreeing to tutor you.
Do you actually read your stuff before posting?
No, but I am getting there. Keep it up and perhaps you can achieve such a goal. Any interest I might have had in clarifying anything to you is rapidly vanishing.
I suggest you tone it all down. Perhaps your “confusion” and frustration is getting the better of you. But… neither myself nor the forum requires you to engage me if it is that difficult for you.
…on to a more interesting dialogue… 
You mean perhaps… sometimes our experience in/of Christianity can be reality altering?
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I have no interest in a conversation with someone who takes statements out of context, chops up my words to suggest a different meaning, and quite obviously omits the meat of my argument. Your supposed clarification was anything but, and your reaction to my criticism hasn’t contributed to correcting that.
I like that 
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I totally agree!!
I think part of the dogma stems from some religous ideology of suffering. Also the old ‘give it to God’ simultaneously shuts down conversation, buries the topic and assumes that it will solve everything. If the church (and by the church I mean her people) were not suffering (mostly silently or at least behind closed doors) there would be no arguement. But she is suffering. Which means we’re missing some key ingredients.
Open, honest communication about mental health issues would be a tremendously good place to start.
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That can be a tough question when someone has been on medication for a long time. Recently I was going through a period of depression such that I figured the medications weren’t helping any longer so I gave up on taking them. It took not quite two weeks to realize that they had been helping as my depression level went from what I was assessing as about three on a scale of one to ten to what in comparison I had to rate as about minus two on that scale.
Maddeningly, just when I was back on the medications and things seemed to be stabilizing the parent corporation of a local department store bought out the local pharmacy, and all accounts at the pharmacy got transferred to the in-store pharmacy of that department store. At that in-store pharmacy instead of taking fifteen minutes to fill a prescription I had to wait five hours only to be informed when I returned that the store didn’t take my insurance, so I am now in prescription limbo.
The pastor at a Foursquare church I attended for a while once preached a long sermon on that instruction, hammering home that it doesn’t mean to do to others what you’d like them to do to you, it means to treat them in the ways that they will recognize as loving – no matter how uncomfortable that may make you. He used an example of hugs versus handshakes: if what to you is encouraging is a firm handshake while hugs seem creepy to you, if hugs are what are encouraging to someone else you don’t give them a handshake, you give a hug – which means that to love someone else as you love yourself requires doing your homework and humbling yourself.
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