John Claypool

"The Bible arranges life and thought in just that sequence. First, we are called on to live passionately and openly and then to use our minds to try to understand and interpret what we have experienced. In this way life moves on and whatever insight is possible is born. If we turn the whole process around and try to put understanding before the living of life, however, everything freezes and we become immobilized.
...
"Harry Emerson Fosdick once wrote that 'a man can put off making up his mind, but he can't put off making up his life.' That statement has all the realism of the Bible behind it. The business of making up one's life, concretely and directly, is more basic than intellectualizing abstractly about it. And not only that, it is the way we were meant to learn. Making up our minds is not something we can do before we experience anything of life; it comes as we experience it, through experience, after experience.
"Centuries ago a philosopher named Descartes climbed into a stove and determined to think out life before he acted. When he finally came to the conclusion 'I think, therefore I am,' he set the whole direction of modern Western thought. His was a fatal mistake, however, for he reversed the true relation of living and thinking and 'got the cart before the horse.'"
"It was the same mistake that Adam and Eve made back in the Garden of Eden. God spread the whole creation out before them like a banquet table and invited them to participate in it fully. They were to eat, drink, work, multiply; that is, to live passionately. But instead of immersing themselves in life, they turned rather to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the symbol of the Ultimate explanation of all things that belonged to God alone, and lusted after it. In other words, before they lived they wanted to know all the answers, whereas God had ordained that knowledge was to come through and by and after experience."
~~~~~
Smart guy . . . I'm going to go look for a job.