Thinking abstractly and using your critical faculties are not mutually exclusive. However, fantasizing nonsense and using your critical, cognitive capabilities are mutually exclusive.
Take a moment to read your own post. Are you not the least bit embarrassed? As for your reference to atheists, I'll choose comical over pathetic any day.
I would demur. Fantasy depends on critical, cognitive capabilities. Reality is experienced abstractly. A parable is a way to direct critical thinking back toward abstraction. This entire world is a fantasy. Jesus
It's true that there are but two choices to make while imprisoned in this world. Those choices are between which teacher you will travel with. Both teachers are in your mind. This world is "Satan's", so-to-speak. Time, space, form...bodies. All these are Satan's domain. And it is hell. While you are in hell, pretty much anything you think agrees with Satan's thought system. His voice sounds like yours. It sounds like the TV. It sounds like the newspaper. It sounds like the radio. It sounds like congress. It sounds like war. It even sounds like some country western music. And it sounds "good". As a rule of thumb, whatever you think of as "you" is what's left after the devil is done messing with your reality. It is this "you" that I advised you "die to yourself that you may live". You do not realize the extent to which you are deceived. Your eyeballs were given for the sole purpose of deceiving you. Eyeballs see nothing other than what "Satan" wants you to see. Brains think only what scripts Satan has written for them to recite. So vigilance is required to listen to another Voice Who will teach you the way home. Satan is a thinking mechanism that you made when you had power. This mechanism is used as an imaginary friend to make a world completely opposite to God's creation. Such is this universe of time, space and form. Satan is the idea of separation made real. Believing in it, it takes on a "life" of it's own. As you invest belief in it, it takes on power. Satan's power comes from your mind. It resides there like a parasite...hidden...worming it's way among your thoughts. Speaking in parable, Satan sweeps a third of your mind into its domain, out of which it builds worlds, dimensions, time, space and all physical form. With a split mind, you cannot think straight. You are literally out of your mind if you think you are a body on a spinning chunk of molten rock circling around a fiery ball of gas as it is pelted by stones from the sky. But this is exactly the domain of the devil, who has tricked you into accepting it as a gift from "God". This domain has been peppered with enough attractions to keep you drunk and dummed down. It's carrot and stick. As soon as you solve one problem in this domain, another crops up. This is to distract your mind from the actual solution. "I and the Father are one" is a solution oriented state of mind, because there is but one problem: You think you are separated from God. If you really believed this statement, your problems would be over. Religions or philosophies that maintain the idea of guilt bind you to hell and your brothers with you. Those that absolve you of any and all guilt lead you to Heaven, your home, your inheritance...your reality. Jesus
First he says we don't need to think to find god. Then he says not only do we need to think abstractly but we need to think abstractly in the UNLIMITED. make up your so-called unlimited abstract mind Z