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Notes -
No argument there. I toyed with the idea of taking psychedelics but didn't because I've been blessed with a fairly good brain and it's about the only advantage I've got, plus looking at most shroom-takers gives the impression that most psychedelics seem to produce the experience of profundity without the real thing. That said, I don't get the impression that it's a one-way slippery slide to madness for most people, more "Pacifist gets in a couple of fights and learns they aren't much fun but there are worse things and gets a bit of confidence".
My thoughts on religion will disappoint you, I suspect. Broadly, I was working in a prestigious research job & field in my mid-twenties and a few crises of faith came to a head simultaneously:
In short, all of the old gods I had worshiped were broadly dismantled in front of my eyes. I want to be clear here: I am not saying that meeting top Rationalists and finding they were nutters proves that all Rationalists are, or that there is nothing good in Rationality. Nor am I now unable to believe anything published in a scientific paper, or any such nonsense.
But.
I was no longer able to treat the things I had believed as being obviously true. Looking at them from the outside, as instantiated in people I didn't much like, tracing them through the historical record, seeing why people came to believe them, it was much easier to see that (in my opinion) they were largely self-coherent belief structures that had become accepted for often-contingent reasons and sometimes had fairly clearly delineated bounds. For example, empirical science is definitionally limited to the material world, and more practically its effectiveness seems to be limited to broadly the 'hard' sciences where observations made about the system don't affect the system (excluding things like social sciences) and you can design valid small experiments without excluding the vast majority of relevant factors (so big chunks of stuff like nutrition, behaviour, politics, economics etc. are also out).
I read some theoretical physics, I read some CS Lewis, I talked to various people and eventually I decided that if there was no one belief system that was obviously correct, then ultimately it came down to my choice. And if it was my choice, I decided to choose a belief system that produced the kind of people and things I liked as opposed to ones who gave me the creeps, might get me a girlfriend with the same kind of preferences, and gave me hope instead of existentialist depression.
In the end I never did 'find God', I just chose to hope that the churchy people were right. In one sense there's nothing rational about it, in another sense looking at my options and choosing the best I could see feels like the most rational thing I could have done. I certainly don't regret it.
It seems to me like a pretty good shot that there's something very broadly God-ish out there - the world came from somewhere and all of the theoretical physics doesn't give any more plausible answer AFAIK - but there's nothing to say that He/She/It is still around or has anything to do with Christianity. I hope that one day God Himself will stop by and give me the good news in person, but otherwise I'm just choosing to have hope and live this way. My experience has been that the Catholics are right and that turning up to Mass every Sunday does a lot more for one's faith than sitting in one's bedroom and fretting. It's just group psychology, yes, but what could be more rational than using psychology to hack your way into a happier and more pro-social mindset, when the alternative is IMO worse and doesn't even manage to be rational?
Like I said, you'll probably find this disappointing. There's not really an argument there, let alone hard apologetics. (Most but not all apologetics is pretty terrible and written to make believers feel smug and clever. I'm going to classes for Confirmation now and they're awful.) But that's what happened, as well as I can write it.
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