I appreciate your insight. As someone who has been fascinated by people’s beliefs for decades I have read many scriptural texts or holy books whatever you want to call them. Can you tell me why logic and critical thinking are tools I should abandon? Can you provide something that shows we have spirits or that there is in fact a spiritual. In psycho analyses I think the ego, as far as we know, is responsible for reality testing. I think you might be comparing my “ego” with a super ego basically the opposite of the ego? I’m trying to determine what’s true. If you care about what’s true you would want to use the best proven tools for determining what is, in fact, true. What instruments would you recommend I use to determine the true claims out of all the different religious claims that are coming my way via this forum? What questions should I ask?
Let’s use an illustration from the world of scientific research, to illustrate this point about instruments.
I know how much most atheists venerate science.
It’s now the established consensus among the scientific community, that dark matter exists. But no particle of dark matter has yet been detected, despite huge resources being applied to try to detect it. Physicists know it exists, because they see how it impacts on other phenomena. But all the tools that have been used to detect it, including huge underground detectors, have so far drawn a blank. So it’s beginning to look as though the tools are not up to the job. Science is looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. But the search has not been abandoned; the theories continue to adapt and adjust.
Perhaps you might begin by accepting that God cannot be directly observed using either your senses or your intellect. But if you were to ask believers not for proof of God, but for evidence of how faith in God has impacted on their lives, you might get some better answers. Or you might not. It is what it is.
And perhaps you might ask yourself what the presence and awareness of God might look like in your life. What, you might consider, is missing in your life, that no person, no material possession, no achievement, no prize, no glory, no recognition can fulfill? If your answer to that last question is “nothing”, then you can abandon the search for divine power, and be on your way.
But if the answer is, yes, something is missing; if you suspect what has been called a hole in the soul, you might begin to ask yourself if some divine power could fill that hole. And then you might begin to search for that power; not with your intellect, but with your soul, guided perhaps by your intuition. No one else can do this for you, though you might seek guidance from others who have trod this path.
