Critical Thinking

By critical I don't mean criticizing.  Before the Reformation people did not much think for themselves about faith.  You were baptized and believed what the church taught.  You might know about some of the scandals of the hierarchy, but you did not much complain.  You were part of this one true church.  Jews and Moslems were hopelessly lost.  With the Reformation people began to see themselves as individuals who thought for themselves and weighed what they saw with what they thought was true.  With literacy, and the printing press we had the ability to find out that there were contradictions in church as we saw it and church as it founders might have meant it to be.  We thought for ourselves.  Today I see both kind of persons.  No matter what the church does or does not do, one person takes it all in and accepts.  They buy the whole package of what the ordained hierarchy say.  "No one is perfect," they say, to some obviously bad behavior.  On the other side, I see people who think for themselves and weigh what they hear promulgated, with what makes sense to them, and their search in reading and study.  They don't reject out of hand, like a petulant child who says "no" because it ruins their selfish fun.  They are good people who put aside what does not fit.  I think both kinds of persons are church members.  Where they meet is in the good that they do in the world.