"I don't consider my faith to be in conflict with my reason."
Let me say at the outset that I am not trying to engage an off-topic discussion of religion. I simply noticed that this post provides a good example to illustrate what I was so persistently examining during our recent, extended discussion.
I advocate reason in determing a course of action too.
What I learned from our discussion is that you do not use reason to determine your beliefs and opinion, not at all, best I can tell, but rather you get there via your gut. Someone who uses reason exudes explanations as readily as a cat exudes spit. Most people, at least some of the time, when they find themselves in a position they reached via the gut, will feel a need to rationalize or retroactively construct a rationale to explain it so that it may seem like they reached it via reason. Yet even when I urged a rationalization, you didn't offer one. It seemed to me like the whole notion was quite alien to you. If you don't even readily come up with rationales after the fact, then it's unlikely to the max that you are in the habit of using reason up front.
" I'm looking for evidence of a thought process. Even a retroactive one to rationalize the prior snap judgment. I'm trying to figure out why you seem so resistant to the notion of a thought process."
Which is why I concluded that your process is virtually all gut and why I seriously doubt the accuracy of the above statement. You may feel the need to take a reasonable course of action but that doesn't mean that you arrive at that course of action via reason.
If a person is able to live in accordance with the actions urged on one by Christianity, and that means live in accordance with Christian morality, the person will likely live a more fulfilling, happier, and more rational life than not living in accordance with Christian morality.
Now, this is an example of a rationalization or retroactive rationale. You didn't arrive at your religious beliefs by some rational process where you noodled out that you would live a better life it you adopted them, therefore you believe. You found the beliefs in your gut, where all religious beliefs come from given that there is no other way to get there. Then, you adopted the above rationale, which you picked up somewhere, to explain why your beliefs are reasonable. We think that we're supposed to have a reason so we construct one after the fact.
That something you believe is may be reasonable doesn't mean that you arrived at it through reason.
The big choice in life isn't between living a life a life of faith-based action or a life of "rational" action ..... the choice is usually a life in pursuit of pleasure, passion, hedonism, whims.
FWIW, I agree with that as regards to the bottom line on how we end up acting. There are life actions that are positive and constructive and they can be arrived at either via faith or reason. |
