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I don’t really disagree with you at all. But to address the critical angle, I value the truth enormously. That’s why I believe all the scientific and logical knowledge I’ve accumulated over the years supports the atheist position. That said though, my religiosity is a testament to the fact that I’m still human and not a purely information processing machine. It’s a cognitive compartmentalization that I let out when it needs to be let out. Some people become so intoxicated by what it does for them it causes them to become overbearing on others and ironically if you seek to win converts to your side of the aisle, becoming an exemplar of the belief that demands people investigate you out of their own curiosity, gets them to open the door. Force is counter-productive in that it sparks resentment among people, despite the fact that that wasn’t how the faith spread so widely throughout the ages.
When people ask me questions of the variety you’re pitching, I don’t descend into my religious beliefs. I’m prepared to talk pure science with them. But first I often try to discern what flavor of an explanation they’re looking for. If they’re looking at the ultimate ends, I’ll go religion if they’re a seeker and I can even talk religious arguments with them, without tearing it down for the reasons I’m persuaded by (again, unless they ask me). I’m intellectually more of a light a torch so they can see the path and be a guide, but don’t tell them they have to travel down the road. In my own life people tend to respect me a lot for doing that. And I don’t demean other ideologies; and even invite criticism against my own.
I’ve explored all kinds of ideologies. I’ve read a ton of secular philosophy and religious philosophy. My general approach is that you can’t claim to understand a worldview without trying to sympathize with it to some degree. Marxian analysis of the commodity was spot on. The Labor Theory of Value he got from Adam Smith which he extended into a longer form has since been jettisoned, and the approach of the Physiocrats has been picked up again by heterodox economists trying to mathematically bring energy in as an input to production. “Free market” libertarian ideology can work very well in the short and medium term but lacks long-term effective planning and still needs to be managed across all scales. I’ve no particular axe to grind against them.
Any religion/ideology/worldview can be a vice, especially when you don’t learn when to put it away as you’re doing other work. And any worldview in general that lacks an update mechanism is inevitably going to drive you right off a cliff. Your only battle is with “time” at that point. I pretty much agree with what you say.
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