[adkadskhj]

Couldn't agree more. The thing that drove me away from faith was feeling like it was a set of truths that required obscuring the rest of life to keep true.

To me faith is something that you _have_ to understand through the lens of your life. There is no understanding faith before life. Your experiences allow you to understand faith. Which isn't to say that life is more important than faith, not at all, just that life is the lens in which you view faith.

In that mindset, faith seems exceptionally deep and complex. Full of discussion, learning, change. Not a black and white truth, but a series of learnings and understanding. You can't learn (in my mind) without change, and so the idea of a churn that teaches absolute truths felt fundamentally broken to me. I think faith is a journey in knowledge. And so many churches seem almost aggressive towards knowledge. They favor rote memorization, i think, as a method to avoid change. To avoid their doctrine as being mutable.

This mindset also seems pervasive into how these people behave in life, too. Just like how children need to learn to think critically, adults need to practice thinking critically. Such a strong emphasis on rote memorization has wide affects, i think.

No grand statements here, and i mean no offense to religion. Just my thoughts on some denominations.