The Pursuit of: Intellectual Freedom

Throughout your upbringing and education, how many concepts were “truth,” and how many authority figures were “infallible”?

I don’t know how to balance the need for children to have things they can count on – how to determine how much “grey” they can handle when they’re first developing – while instilling the idea that it is good essential to ask questions and to investigate ideas from various viewpoints before forming an opinion (we don’t even need to have an opinion on everything!). I fear that critical thinking is sorely lacking in (or even condemned by) many educational systems.

We all have unique challenges to our growth and psychological development; some of my mine stem from my fundamentalist Christian upbringing. If you’d like to read more about that, I’d recommend this excellent blog, which addresses the ongoing struggles encountered when leaving the “protective” bubble of that paradigm.

Within the last two months, I have come to recognize the lingering effects of this ideology on my life and my choices in a new way (by no means implying that it is all “bad”) and to acknowledge how deeply ingrained it is in me, my family, and our sources of knowledge (“truth”). I am allowing myself to truly question everything and to respect my intuition – at least, I am attempting to.

I’m compiling some resources here that help/expand/interest me. I hope that you may be exposed to something new and helpful, too (and I welcome your suggestions!).

Photo credit: https://wall.alphacoders.com/big.php?i=104284