Quote:
Originally Posted by sjh
Even before I became a believer, when I saw myself as both a rationalist and a pragmatist I would find your statement inaccurate.
People are highly irrational, do not want to have reasoned discourse and do not make decisions in that manner.
They never have and they never will. In fact they are not capable of such.
Appeal to that approach is either a rhetorical device for the debater to win their argument or the presenter is unaware of their own self-deception.
Further I make no request that any one votes, acts, performs in a certain manner because if my beliefs. If asked I give the best answers I can. I turn to Biblical authority to find my identity. I make no requirement that others do so.
I am one of the most analytical, rational, mental-oriented persons I know. There are thousands of people from the past 40+ years who would concur. I spent most of my life begging people to think clearly. I still do.
Everyone has non-rational components that are fundamental to their identity and behavior. Humans cannot exist without them.
In many ways my distaste for the current of intellectual thought from Rousseau forward is its intellectual dishonesty, not that is threatens my Faith.
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I never wrote anywhere that people in general were highly rational and analytical. I wrote that the culture that we lived in was based on those values. There's a big difference between those two things. It's similar to the view that humans are not naturally monogamous but the culture that we live in has until recently been based on monogamy.
I also never said that humans had no non-rational components. In fact, I wrote up a long post in reply to a similar statement you made a few days ago, explaining that I'm not a rationalist.
The question of reason and unreason in my view is similar to the question of monogamy or not. Regardless of our natural propensities are we better served by emphasizing reason, (even in religion) or not and minimizing unreason. I understand there are lots of people like Kierkegaard who are strongly in favor of emphasizing the unreason of religion. I disagree with them.
And whether you personally are interested in imposing biblical authority on other people is relevant to your views, there certainly are millions of Christian believers in the USA who want to do that. A brief account of that movement can be found here:
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/151960/michele_bachmann_was_inspired_by_my_dad_and_his_christian_reconstructionist_friends_--_here%27s_why_that%27s_terrifying/?page=1
Not sure if you're familar with Christian Reconstructionism or Dominionism and its cultural goals, but they are certainly repressive from my point of view, especially to gay people.