said by many an anglophile : Ta Muchly! (yes, the auto-correct is screaming at me, but that's the phrase/idiom!).
What you note is of course true. And thirty plus yrs. is considerable, far beyond the 10,000 hours of study (on average - though not a mean nor median time) I've seen bandied about as the minimum for most fields of endeavour both vocationally and otherwise needed to attain a 'novice' rating on a subject of interest. I was not insulted or affronted by your observation of gaps - well, perhaps if we had been face-toface you *might* (translation -yeah, probably!) have seen my pulse notch up a few cycles per minute ! (though not much, hopefully!). The neuroscience example is odd or perhaps just coincidentally serendipitous as just recently I've read a 'pop-sci' though very well researched and written (IMO) book on that field - "The Other Brain"by R. Douglas Fields which has a fascinating eye on glia and their functions and also gives a nice brief(ish) pithy summary of brain science history 'to boot'. Anyway, it's something like metallurgy for me - I know "enough about _that_ {metallurgy} to get into trouble" (!) :^) Steel making and forging, silver-smithing, bronze-smithing, brass, copper, any-metal-is-thing, is almost (though not quite) as interesting to me as astronomy - the history of which is, to me, equally fascinating.
I consider you a mentor in things religious and tangentially and feel you have a cosmopolitan perspective on politics - which is v. refreshing, may I add! Sometimes it's hard to know, though, that my perhaps blindered view is but a tiny segment of the larger reality!
In other words I value your patient discussion of your faith and see many, many things in all my own 'studies' (if you can dignify them with that word!) that concur with the Witness 'angle' (I love that film noir word!) or version of reading of what Christianity actually entails for the believer, the scholar, the 'other' religions - which as you note some have been shoehorned into functioning as wordly missives or permission to commit mass murders most foul and heinous. So, all things considered, no, I would not exactly rush to join a caliphate-based world faith - though arguably if that was the only choice, after a while there would only be an "underground" of 'competing' religions, mayhap akin to what I understand existed for the Christ followers in some regions of the ancient world before the 3rd century A.D. and far later in some remote(er) areas of our precious planet. Phew, again my fingers are tired - one of these decades I'll maybe learn to touch-type. Maybe. :^)
Around my current and former area of sprawling greater Houston we have "Baptists On Bicycles" spreading _their_ good word, plus sometimes two or more Catholics (usually on foot though sometimes also astride self-powered two wheelers!), almost always Hispanic, sometimes bilingual, sometimes not - who mostly "give up" on me as soon as they see I'm Caucasian but nonetheless leave me with useful literature about their chosen or local places of worship. The longest "getting a talking to" once happened many years ago when I was about thirty or thirty five yrs. of chronological age and answered the door without first checking who it was through the door viewer (peephole lens) and just happened to be smashed on scotch about ten in the morning on a Saturday, obviously so and actually holding a "on the rocks" amber liquid in a nice crystal square "short glass" I reserved for such 'libation'. I agreed with the admonitions and cheerfully invited the twin Baptists inside - they declined (politely I might add) and switched to my glaring next-door neighbor who had opened his door to see what was "going on". I guess. And maybe they both felt their "message" had gotten through - which it did I suppose as the 'scene' is still fresh in my memory. And sometimes I really wonder what my life would have become had I taken them up on their offer of joining their Church. I was raised a Methodist by my Dad's mother though that kind-of-sorta faded away when I lost contact with her around the time I was 24 or so onwards. From what I've heard Methodists and Baptists are "close-ish" though not identical on some points. Shrug - perhaps I'd be living in Wales or something? Not a bad place to be, I reckon - heck, I'd absolutely love to retire on the Isle of Man and catch the street TT's there often. Mebbe even have my very own Cafe Racer - like a hot 750 or maybe liter bike, though a nice 600 would probably be quite enough HP to kill me. Ha! That would be a good way to go, too, if it was "quick"-like and final. Just after I learn I have about 6 hours to live, maybe... :^)
Rick " I'd like to crash at 165 MPH - yep, that should do it! " Jones