I have some advice for people who have decided to go back to religion after years or a lifetime of not practicing. Or after several generations, as in my case. This is based completely on my personal experience, and it worked for me.
The advice is: don’t try to understand everything. There’s no need. Don’t intellectualize or rationalize. There’s an enormous comfort in just letting it go for a bit and simply being in the moment. Remember that many, many generations of people before you worked, thought, and prayed to make these rituals as effective as possible. Trust them and simply relax. Yes, there’s a lot you won’t understand. And you might not feel it in the way people who never got interrupted in their religious practice do. But that’s OK. Just go and be there. Follow other people’s lead. There is no harm, to put it mildly, in stepping out of the hubristic belief that it’s up to you to understand and decide everything.
In other words, you don’t need to get it. You simply need to be there.
Clarissa's Blog 
There’s quite a lot in Orthodoxy, in particular, that’s not accessible to the intellect, which is anathema to the Western mindset. You can only learn it through participation. Worth the effort, though 🙂
Christ’s disciples were fishermen, not philosophers.
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Yes, absolutely, and this is what trips up many very cerebral people. Also, recognizing an authority outside of oneself is very hard for many people.
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It’s kind of interesting to me that getting saved is a child like simplicity and yet people overthink it and crash and burn struggling to grasp the concept that little children have no issue with. Well interesting and sad really.
Once saved always saved. Jesus paid the price for our sins once and for all. He didn’t pay for the sins you have committed up until today and no further. He paid the price for all of them. If it were not so, how could he have paid for your sins when your grandfather’s grandfather wasn’t even born yet. This is the gift of salvation, if you choose to believe and put your faith in his blood, you are saved. Likewise if you don’t believe in him if you don’t put your faith into his blood, you won’t be. It is a simple yes or no.
Those who are unsaved a lot of the time tend to say things along the lines of I’m a good person so I’m going to Heaven, or if God was truly good, why would he send people to hell. This seems to trip people the most of all I think.
The issue is, that it is not God sending you to hell, you do that yourself. We are born with a sin issue, it is a curse. No one with the exception of Jesus has been able to live their entire life without sinning once. That tiny little white lie when your friend asked if they were fat or not, that was a lie, a sin. That burst of hate at a sibling where for a second you imagine killing them, that counts as murder, a sin. And on and on and on. God is Holy and Good, because he is he cannot allow any blot or blemish (sin) into heaven. Isaiah 64:6 “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind have taken us away.” God made a way to redeem us, to remove the curse of sin. Jesus the son of God, God in the flesh was born and lived a sinless life. He who committed no sin died a horrible death in payment of our sins. That if we accepted the gift we could be redeemed.
Your works will not save you. Are you as a mortal able to wipe away your sins? Why would you think anything you can do will remove your sins? You are physical, this is a soul or spiritual issue. You can pray 23 of 24 hours a day for 60 years, and your works still won’t have removed your sins. The only one able to fix this is God, and his word has told us the way. In this current age, the Age of Grace, our salvation comes from faith in the Blood of Jesus that was shed for our sake. It’s not that hard of a concept, sin requires payment to wash away. You cannot wash it away by your deeds. Only God is able to and he sent his only son Jesus to pay the price for all those willing to believe. Jesus paid it all, his blood was shed in exchange for yours. All you have to do is accept. It is that simple, just believe, have faith that Jesus has done what he said he would do, that his blood covers your sin. Believe and be saved.
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Baloney! The entire religious concept of “sin” — that every single human being is somehow born with his/her soul stained with evil that he/she must spend a lifetime agonizing over and constantly apologizing for to some invisible, undetectable deity is risible nonsense.
How ironic that evolution gave the human race superior brainpower, only to have people use it to conjure up such guilt-ridden superstitious drivel.
Dreidel
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