More Heart, Less Head

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I am a religious person (polytheist, Greek pantheon). I approach religion via theology, ethics, and philosophy rather than from an emotional and/or mystical direction. Not that emotional or mystical experiences are absent from my religious practice, but that is not the way I naturally engage with religious thought and practice. I have found that I continually have people telling me to focus less on theology, logic, or forming cohesive theories behind practice, and "access my emotions," or some other somewhat dimissive but well-meaning phrase.

I wonder, regardless of what religion (or even non-religion, if this is something that happens among atheists) you practice, do you often find when expressing your faith you find people advising you to focus more on emotion and less on intellectual analysis? Is it a problem when you try to engage in your religious community?

I'm finding this issue to be increasingly a problem. It went from what I considered to be well-meaning NT advice, to actually making me angry as a dismissal of my particular value to my religious community.

I think it started with Martin Luther, one of the founders of the Protestant Reformation...


... yes ... master ...


No one wants reasoning people in the religious community; they instead want people who will perpetuate myth while excoriating science. It's all about "Ortholalia" over "Orthopraxia", or even "Orthodoxia".

As long as you have a Bible verse to answer every question, you are in tight with the religious heirarchy.

Luther had a creative way of expressing himself.

What is funny about that is that his reason led him to challenge the church and speak out against corruption. He was an astute scholar.

I agree that most people tend to value ortholalia over anything else.

Ironically, in my community (which lacks a canon of sacred texts) answering questions via an authoritative or historical text is a good way to find yourself in the minority.

When I was involved in the New Age movement, it became obvious that I could invent any kind of "Doctrine" as long as it did not directly conflict with the core beliefs of other New Agers:

• Evolution to Godhood. Humans are considered to be divine, as co-creators, and as the ultimate hope for the future of the world.
• Do whatever feels good, as long as you are not hurting someone else.
• Situational ethics. An act that would be utterly heinous in one context could be loving and merciful in another.
• Universal tolerance. There is no fixed morality, so immorality of an act is never a consideration.

In other words, they taught me that I am not accountable to anyone other than myself. Of course, this also means that no one else is accountable to me.

When I tried to construct a fixed code of ethics based on an extrapolation of the Golden Rule, I was told that such thinking is oppressive, and that I could never achieve enlightenment as long as my mind was fixed on a system of "Rights" and "Wrongs".

That was after they taught me how to con people out of their hard-earned wages by performing various kinds of "readings".

Note: The key word is perform.

I find "Universal Tolerance" is often neither universal nor tolerant when a view different from the person espousing tolerance is expressed.

Same for "Open Mindedness", where every opinion is supposed to be as good as any other, as long as none of them disagree. Here in California, I have met countless numbers of people who insist that I keep an open mind, yet they have no patience at all for the opinions that I may express.

How do you give heart though?

Here's the Link.

I was thinking someone would make an organ donation reference.

I never understood the "reason" of new age paganism. The whole thing seems so contrary to reason. We could just wander up Mt. Olympus and take a look-see. I'm not trying to beliefs at all. I'm actually hoping that for once someone can explain it to me. What reason could lead one to follow the Hellenic pantheon, or the Gaelic gods, or the Norse?

I once had a manager who was a follower of Loki. He actually believed that the world was created by the sundering of Ymir. I've spent years trying to wrap my head around it. At least with Judaism and, to a lesser extent, Christianity, you see thousands of years of rational thinking being applied to their beliefs, with people like Maimonides and Aquinas analyzing the holy texts and delivering proofs (of questionable veracity). Nothing of the kind has ever been applied to the pagan beliefs. Almost exclusively, I've found emotion (rebelliousness, primarily) to be the driving force behind Neo-Paganism.

But how is Abrahamic religion any more reasonable? I often find people hold non-Abrahamic religions to a higher standard, which is absurd.

Most people have a religious experience that leads them to a new faith. The problem is that many Abrahamics and atheists find it hard to grasp that people outside the Abrahamic worldview (and many atheists still act explicitly within that worldview) can have deep, profound religious experiences.

Not all paganism is New Age, and most serious polytheism is not. I identify as a polytheist because I disagree with both New Age and modern pagan thought.



Is a belief in Ymir any less rational than a belief the earth was created in 6 days?

Julian, Plato, Cicero, Plethon, Aristotle, Aurelius, Solon, and Iamblichus are just a handful of polytheists who apply reason to their faith. That practice is returning in the modern polytheist communities, albeit slowly. Only in the last few decades have we even had translations of ancient texts written about religion that have not been filtered, and bowdlerized, through an Abrahamic lens.

Speaking as a Lutheran myself, the old man certainly did make use of colorful language - some of which, such as his later writings on Jews, we rather wish he'd have kept to himself.
Actually, Luther's beef with reason was not a matter of the total embracing of irrationality, but that only through faith, not reason, could human beings know God.
Today, Lutheranism is known for it's intellectual tradition, and very sober, subdued liturgical worship.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Abrahamic religion is not reasonable. But they've framed it in a way that can not be proven false. God existing outside of the universe, for example, or encompassing it. Sure, the proof for God is virtually nil, and the logic is questionable, but the beauty of the Abrahamic version is that it's set up in a way that they can kind of lawyer it into compatibility with science, such as the "Evolution as God's patch release schedule" stuff.



Sure, it's possible. The religious experience is a documented psychological phenomenon, that has been intentionally induced by human beings. It's an emotional thing, not a rational one.



Yes. First, Jewish scholars, of whom Maimonides is the best known, explain that pretty much the entire book of Genesis is allegory, and most modern Christian scholars agree. The "6 Days" thing was a set up for the allocation of a specific day as the Sabbath. Even in a literal interpretation, the manufacture of the universe in 6 Days can not be proven false. Genesis claims that the Earth, specifically, was created because that's all anyone knew. Even modern literalists say that what God was creating was the universe, not the Earth. Since we can't prove it false, then we have to accept it as plausible, if remotely so.

Also, first, there was light. The big bang. Second, God populated the heavens with stars, the coagulation of particulate matter into stars and planets. Then, God makes the animals, the start of life. Then Man appears. That's a very simplistic view of dawn of time, but you have to admit, it's more accurate than "The Gods got pissed at their old man, hacked him to bits, and life sprung from his corpse."



Reason must include all up-to-date scientific knowledge. Applying reason to polytheistic faiths shows us that the Sun is not pulled across the sky by Apollo in his Chariot. It is a ball of gas around which our planet moves. Just about all of Aristotle's theories about the universe are wrong, considering that it is not a series of crystalline layers with planets perfectly positioned with us at the center. It is not his fault. He did the best he could with what he knew. But he has been proven wrong. There is no den of the gods atop Mount Olympus, any more than there ever was an Ark with every animal on Earth that crashed into Mt. Ararat.

The most important point I can make is that Abrahamic religions are absurd, but they have been brilliantly structured so that we can't disprove them, because they are lawyered to work with science. That will come one day. Hitching your horse to a wagon that doesn't even attempt to drive along the road of science and rationality is regressive, and ultimately irrational.

You are making atheist arguments arguments against religion, which can be applied equally against both Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic religions. I have no desire to trot out the tired theist VS atheist arguments that are all over the internet. If you don't have something to add to the topic at hand, then you are off topic, and should start a new thread.

That is one of the reasons I like Luther. He used a "left brained" approach to defend ideas that were essentially ephemeral. I find it fascinating.

I dislike his racist and misogynistic ideas, but I admire his tenacity and the brilliance of his reformation campaign.

I'm not trying to argue in favor of atheism. You complained that others were telling you to "access your emotions" and look at it less logically. I asked how anyone could rationally believe in a polytheistic religion, when so many of their beliefs are provably false. My argument could basically be boiled down to "All religion is fundamentally emotional." You can manipulate it and lawyer it to make it less so, but the core of religion is emotion, the filling of a "spiritual void".

Anyway, since you asked me to vacate, that'll be all.