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Notes -
For other Christians on here, or seriously religious people, how do you handle the paradox of belief? I was talking to a friend today about my recent experience joining an Orthodox Christian church, and it's just so interesting. The 'logical' part of my brain relentlessly attacks what it sees as the foolishness of religion, ritual and sacrament.
And yet, when I partake and do my best to take it seriously, I feel healed. The spiritual water that Christ talks about in the Bible slakes my thirst. It's almost impossible to conceptualize, but damn it I've tried so many different ways to heal my inner wounds throughout my life, and this one works better than anything, by far.
How do you make sense of a serious religious practice, while keeping the ability to be seriously rational?
I fully understand that the Motte community evolved from the rationalist community, but I just don't believe that you can be a completely rational person. There's so much happening to you from the inside and from the outside and you have absolutely no clue about it, not knowing what just hit you or led you to this mood or another. I think that this whole project of rationality is too much too demand from a person. I'm perfectly fine being full of contradictions, conflicting temptations, being driven by vague emotions or ephemeral visions. I think this is more genuine and truthful way of being then trying to squeeze your whole personality in one huge framework of rationality.
No one convinced me better, and no one speaks about this view on being more eloquently and beautifully then Eric Lander, a mathematician standing behind the Human Genome Project and a practicing Jew. The link is here, please watch it, its only three minutes.
FYI I'm a Catholic.
Yudkowsky strongly suggested that the rat community describe themselves as Aspiring Rationalists.
Our baseline human physiology no more lets you be a perfect rationalist than you can emulate a TI-84 in your head, at most you can, with effort, emulate some of the properties where it's relevant to you.
At any rate, the perfect shouldn't allowed to become the enemy of the better, at least until it's a tangible option.
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