My dear Kendel.
I value everything you say as for many others here, each from their own hard won foxhole. We’re calling out to each other, trying to find out the situation. Some are too wounded and can only rave.
As for rationality (logos), some of the greatest exponents of it in morality, like Kant and Bentham, lack the other two legs of the rhetorical stool. Ethos and pathos. Is it right, fair and how does it feel. Which is why my favourite philosopher is Hume, “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”. That puts rationality in its place.
We’ve all had to bear unbearable loss, life, eventually, sooner and later, is loss. Rationality can be a surprising companion in that. We, the lucky survivors, have learned through suffering. Although sleep, rather than learning, would not have been unwelcome. (In all the weakness and finding things out about myself I’d rather not, I have experienced unbelievable physical pain : ) I knew I couldn’t stay sane in it. But I did. : ) That was something… worth discovering.)
It’s a bitter fruit that made this jam/jelly/marmalade/preserves/Konfitüre.
Certainly, stuffing God into spaces we can’t figure out how to fill with knowledge of nature is absurd. He is not caulking, or jam. I’m not sure that it makes things infinitely worse, but it certainly answers no questions helpfully about nature or our part of it to squish God into that gap like a failed baker, attempting to give shape to a sunken cake.
Excellent. Thank you.
Let’s hold onto hope in Jesus right now, Klax. This is something quite different from us filling gaps with God. Perhaps Jesus, who tells us he is God, is filling gaps and cracks and holes in us with something much more precious than jelly. That bread and wine are a wonderous filling, working from our insides out.
Nice. Really.
I am surely not a very rational person.
Thank God!
My dear husband is an economist, trained to assume people are rational. The last 6 or 7 years in the U.S. have undeniably demonstrated to him that people are NOT as rational as they believe if at all. Our mid-scale minds can deceive us of their powers.
But that is the finding of… rationality! I love the paradox. It’s in Hume I feel.
Collins and Lewis WERE definitely looking for meaning. You and I yearn for it, too, even if it’s not rational to do so.
In existential terms, it’s perfectly rational. Beyond Seneca, Hume, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Frankl, Husserl, rationality, for me there is Rogers. You’re worth it. We’re worth it. All are worth it. Let’s find a way. Even if there is no transcendence. Even if Jesus were not God incarnate, He would still be the moral lever to move the world.
When I listen to Credence, and the harmonies my brain has been culturally trained to enjoy, I am not concerned with rationality, although I praise God for the meaning he has allowed me to assign to and the pleasure he allows me to experience at hearing a number of frequencies blended at a certain time and in a certain way. And yet, in itself, the music is purposeless. It’s irrational. It’s ok.
When we were neritic fish we bathed in music. Is beauty rational? I was playing on Creedance as in Clearwater Revival I’m afraid! I realized you must mean Christian music. I’ve searched but cannot find it. Do you have a link?