Concepts of God and Religion

[patrice]

9. I have tried to say the same thing WAAAAY less elegantly, and with way more words, here on DU.

That's one of the reasons I liked the article, because it does not assume that reason and faith are mutually antagonistic.

I think they CAN motivate/drive one another.

One thing rationalists should ask themselves: if reason is everything you say it is, why is there any "other" knowing at all (e.g. what the heck do animals do? are they reasoning?). If what we are referring to as "reason" is everything some people are claiming it is, HOW did these "other" non-rational processes come to be, wouldn't there have to be a reason for them too?

One thing I like to point out is that if there is something that reason differentiates itself from, where did THAT come from, what IS it? Like a bas relief figure manifests itself out of a background, how could there be a figure unless there is a ground? How can we say ONLY the figure has significance, when the figure would not manifest in the first place without that phenomenological ground?

Did you see the self-portraits painted by George Bush, Jr.? You can probably google them to see what I'm thinking of here. Those pictures represent what happens to us, because we lose that phenomenological ground. We engage, more or less honestly, in reason and pay lipservice to that "otherness" in our pre-fabricated religions, but LOSE the point of both by denying that they are parts of the SAME thing and so much more besides.

Thank you, SarahM32! I am pleased to see you here.