No need to apologize for emotion. LessWrong is all about rationally pursuing your values. The rationality part isn’t helped by emotions, but the values part comes from nowhere else. At the deepest level, a value is just something you like. Rationality is about tethering yourself to the real world as you decide how to maximize your goodness taking your values as an assumption, as a given, as a BELIEF, as a FAITH.
To the extent “Christian” means a belief in some “supernatural” aspect to some man who lived here for 33 years about 2000 years ago, and indeed a belief that this man in some sense is or was an omnipotent omniscient supernatural being who not only created everything, but is also somehow deserving or automatically eligible for our love, our worship, our slavish devotion, well that’s a bunch of low entropy statements with extraordinarily small amounts of evidence OTHER THAN MERE ASSERTION by some other humans of its truth. So it is probably hard to be a “rationalist christian” by that definition since that definition of christian sets so much belief on things that follow only from the authority and not from observation of reality.
But if by Christian all you mean is you have a taste for some of his moral/ethical statements, then heck, you can be a Dawknsist, a Yudkovskyist, a Feynmanist, a Ghandiist, and still have a strong role for rationality in realizing your values.
No need to apologize for emotion. LessWrong is all about rationally pursuing your values. The rationality part isn’t helped by emotions, but the values part comes from nowhere else. At the deepest level, a value is just something you like. Rationality is about tethering yourself to the real world as you decide how to maximize your goodness taking your values as an assumption, as a given, as a BELIEF, as a FAITH.
To the extent “Christian” means a belief in some “supernatural” aspect to some man who lived here for 33 years about 2000 years ago, and indeed a belief that this man in some sense is or was an omnipotent omniscient supernatural being who not only created everything, but is also somehow deserving or automatically eligible for our love, our worship, our slavish devotion, well that’s a bunch of low entropy statements with extraordinarily small amounts of evidence OTHER THAN MERE ASSERTION by some other humans of its truth. So it is probably hard to be a “rationalist christian” by that definition since that definition of christian sets so much belief on things that follow only from the authority and not from observation of reality.
But if by Christian all you mean is you have a taste for some of his moral/ethical statements, then heck, you can be a Dawknsist, a Yudkovskyist, a Feynmanist, a Ghandiist, and still have a strong role for rationality in realizing your values.