Depends on how much effect your religion has on you. I doubt you’ll be any less rational if you go to church every day although you may end up loathing it one day.
If anybody has a link to the post that Eliezer told a story about how he was told to “pray and (literally) stfu” you’ll have a good example of how religion can screw up reasoning. You can still reason effectively in religion irrelevant to how true it is, but you’re probably going to encounter something you’ll say “this doesn’t make sense” and you will one day encounter someone who WILL do something entirely paradoxial while wearing their chosen religious headwear.
To be fair, this kind of example is a bit extreme. I used to read edwardfeser.blogspot.com and he fails at being empiricist, but does not fail at logical reasoning. His only—albeit catastrophic—failure is “X follows from the premises we accepted to be true, hence reality works like X”. Map-terrain… However, even Feser could not make a useful ratonalist because of this failure at empiricism. Unwilling to step over the map-terrain gap, the language-reality gap.
Really, the primarily problem of Feser type smart theists is not that they cannot reason, it is that they believe too much in language. Theism almost follows from that failure mode, as language is a mind-product, so when they believe reality works so that that the arguments expressed in words, which tend to convince human minds also happen to be true out there in reality, almost assumes there is a human-like mind behind the universe. Proper atheism starts with the idea of accepting the universe does not give half a shit about our logic, reasoning and intellectuality and we can find ideas perfectly convincing and we can admit they are true and out there still they aren’t: but that is really hard as it means really throwing out much of our intellectual history and tradition. It is an incredible huge gap for a culture that got shaped by e.g. Plato to say—and we MUST say this—“Your ideas convinced me perfectly. They are still not true.”
No, it’s a great example of EVERYTHING (not just religion) going to shit because it basically says “don’t think, do”.
It’s not any less harmful even if we remove religion from there. It can apply to.. practically everything. I think it’s sound personal philosophy to know what the fuck you’re actually doing. Hell, it’s probably the first step in making a plan and it’s a step in every process of it.
Depends on how much effect your religion has on you. I doubt you’ll be any less rational if you go to church every day although you may end up loathing it one day.
If anybody has a link to the post that Eliezer told a story about how he was told to “pray and (literally) stfu” you’ll have a good example of how religion can screw up reasoning. You can still reason effectively in religion irrelevant to how true it is, but you’re probably going to encounter something you’ll say “this doesn’t make sense” and you will one day encounter someone who WILL do something entirely paradoxial while wearing their chosen religious headwear.
To be fair, this kind of example is a bit extreme. I used to read edwardfeser.blogspot.com and he fails at being empiricist, but does not fail at logical reasoning. His only—albeit catastrophic—failure is “X follows from the premises we accepted to be true, hence reality works like X”. Map-terrain… However, even Feser could not make a useful ratonalist because of this failure at empiricism. Unwilling to step over the map-terrain gap, the language-reality gap.
Really, the primarily problem of Feser type smart theists is not that they cannot reason, it is that they believe too much in language. Theism almost follows from that failure mode, as language is a mind-product, so when they believe reality works so that that the arguments expressed in words, which tend to convince human minds also happen to be true out there in reality, almost assumes there is a human-like mind behind the universe. Proper atheism starts with the idea of accepting the universe does not give half a shit about our logic, reasoning and intellectuality and we can find ideas perfectly convincing and we can admit they are true and out there still they aren’t: but that is really hard as it means really throwing out much of our intellectual history and tradition. It is an incredible huge gap for a culture that got shaped by e.g. Plato to say—and we MUST say this—“Your ideas convinced me perfectly. They are still not true.”
No, it’s a great example of EVERYTHING (not just religion) going to shit because it basically says “don’t think, do”.
It’s not any less harmful even if we remove religion from there. It can apply to.. practically everything. I think it’s sound personal philosophy to know what the fuck you’re actually doing. Hell, it’s probably the first step in making a plan and it’s a step in every process of it.