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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?
You don't, while rationality is independent of one's axiomatic beliefs, there's no way you can reconcile epistemic hygiene with "serious" religious practise.
At best you compartmentalize and delude yourself into having belief-in-belief.
Interesting. The serious religious intellectuals tend to argue that you can't have any sort of epistemic hygiene without a 'first mover' - or in other words that the modern scientific worldview is based on a contradiction given that the a priori assumption is that no belief is ultimately true, which is in itself an ultimate belief.
Anyway I get a bit confused by these super high order epistemological arguments, but that's the steelmanned version of the other side's argument as far as I can tell.
ETA: I guess this is what rehashing the internet atheist wars from the other side feels like... good lord.
Even if you wish to hold it as axiomatic that there's an Uncaused Cause or something responsible for the existence of the universe, there is no way near sufficient evidence to imbue it with the usual crap like Omnipotence, Omniscience or Omnibenevolence, or assume it cares at all what we do or is even capable of doing so.
If God as it's claimed to exist created the universe via a Big Bang, it's a more parsimonious claim to state that the Big Bang itself is capable of arising ex nihilo, pending a Grand Unified Theory of Everything that explains if multiverses and the like exist.
And looking at the state of the world, it's indistinguishable from a scenario where a Creator simply set the wheels in motion and fucked off forever. Hence I'm more than content to swing Newton's Flaming Laser Sword about till it hits something it can't cut.
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