RE: The need to believe?
July 10, 2017 at 3:59 pm
(This post was last modified: July 10, 2017 at 4:10 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(July 10, 2017 at 3:36 pm)JackRussell Wrote:(July 10, 2017 at 3:31 pm)Khemikal Wrote: Generally speaking, people who do not follow a religious tradition and may not even believe in gods as entities - but do feel or believe in some sort of inneffable, commonly supernatural, "x" or spirit permeating the world around them. Any animist, most neopagans, assorted shamans and fortune tellers and ritualists fit this descriptor. All deists fit. Some theists - but it's a stretch on that count.
Ok, fine, but why should any rational person accept this too. Wonder and the numinous as experiential can be understood perfectly naturally as well.
Rational people accept a great many things.....plenty of which aren't rational. We have one in thread who feels what they feel. There's no attempt to rationalize it, or claim that it's rational. Ultimately there may be rational reasons for such a feeling but that doesn;t mean that the feeling, itself, is rational. We do this all the time - get things right fro the wrong reasons, or wrong for the right reasons. Sure, some underlying process might conform to a standard of rationality but it doesn't mean that the specifics of whatever it is that is believed are, themselves, rational.
While we can, for example, say that the numinous has a rational explantion...who is using whatever that explanation is in their experience of it? Surely not OP. Often enough, reason-as-employed by human beings is a happy or unhappy accident...and, for some, it's both all at once. I'd rather not know that my children are skilled manipulators. I -do- know that they are, but I still can't bring myself to feel that way about them when I look in their wittle faces. Similarly, I like to assume and expect the best of adults around me.....but tell me, how rational is that? Why should any rational person accept the decency and dignity of man?
@Mord
There's nothing incoherent about the supernatural..it's too nonspecific a category to claim incoherence...it just doesn't exist.
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