The bolded seems like a very odd distinction to make as a determinist. Can you describe what "rational thought " and "analysis" look like in practice up against "emotional thought" when all of these things were precipitated by previous physical events and are themselves just physical events that could never be otherwise? You're certainly not saying that we stand outside of the causal closure of the universe and can change the course of reality right? Does a ice berg "want" to melt? Does a meteor do "analysis"? Can an earthquake be "emotional"? Your epistemology doesn't reflect your ontology.

Rational thought comports to reality. Emotions mislead us in our assessments of reality.

What exactly is a rationalist to you? Someone who doesn't presuppose ancient religious stories as true, and instead values evidence in deciphering what is actual and true about the universe? What does it tell you that you make rationality the enemy of your beliefs? Anything? Is there anybody home but a sophist spieler who has to discount reason to get their belief system over? Over on who? Themselves, anybody who will listen, the dread "rationalists," all the other enemy religions, the infidels ... all enemies of the true believer.

The whole game, the whole little charade of dismissing what is in evidence for what you believe, claimed to be necessary for the superstitious category of the supernatural, is just blatantly the only way to get the religion in. You could never do it like you do EVERYTHING ELSE, no, there's a special way to do the religious thing. You dismiss reality, you dismiss evidential warrant, you dismiss reason, you dismiss rationality, you create your own reality ... and you are in like Flynn. And the last thing you can do with it is subject it to reality testing. I mean what's reality worth when there is a future reality and you are privy to all its specifications because of your faith, actually, not in god, but in your own religious special status ?

Again, if, in your mind, reality is a collection of facts, then you are deeply confused. Nobody cares about random facts in comparison to actualizing a better reality with a higher quality of life. Including you.

You can scroll up a handful of posts and see:

Rationalists erroneously hold the rational intellect as sacred instead of the self. They miss the critical importance of identity + relationship in connection to truth and reality. They lack faith, love, and hope.

Watching a bunch of anti Christian Youtube videos and uniting over your resentment is not true communion or meaning. It’s shallow. None of you would lay down your life for each other.

I'm not sure where "assessment" exists in your ontology. From your view assessment is simply neurons firing in your brain or a synapsis connected in a certain sort of way. These assessments are entirely reducible to the physical. The firing and connections are simply downstream from other physical events. You were necessarily going to decide whatever you decided, and the same goes for me.

Or are you indeed saying that we can choose to be rational and rationally decide between 2 options in a libertarian sense?

The problem for rationalism taken neat is that they of course must presuppose the reliability of reasoning in order to justify the reliability of reasoning. There is no way out. They are stuck in an infinite regress just like the rest. Rationalism is not a lifeboat out of circularity.

The ghost of logical positivism looms large among western "intellectuals" who somehow think the rules don't apply to them

The point I was trying to make when I asked if your understanding of emotions stemmed from rationality or experience was to point out that you didn't discover the most basic truths about them through rational thought. Something happened, you had an emotional response to it, and that's that. I'm sure you've experienced a variety of emotions, but you wouldn't be able to communicate them to someone else if they themselves hadn't experienced those emotions to use as a reference point. Try explaining love to a person who's never felt it in a way that would make sense to them. It would be like trying to describe the color green to a blind person. Sure, we can make all sorts of observations about how emotions correlate with neural activity, events that elicit them, etc., but if an agreed upon experiential foundation is lacking, none of those observations can be made.

If you want to know if we have free will, the answer is no one knows if the universe is deterministic and it doesn’t matter either way. No one knows whether the universe is purely deterministic or not, things like quantum indeterminacy could mean it isn’t.

Whether we have free will or are automatons following predetermined actions triggered by predetermined reactions to predetermined stimuli, it doesn’t matter because both appear the same to us. And in either case emotions are brain states that make it harder for us to make rational assessments.

You might dislike the idea of a deterministic universe that means all your decisions are predetermined, so much that you reject it. But if that is actually what the universe actually is, then your dislike is an example of an emotional response that causes you to reject reality.

Yes, rationalists have to presuppose that logic works. That gives us far fewer presuppositions than theism requires, and unlike religious presuppositions, we can test logic to show that it works in general and on specific cases we apply it to. Maybe someday someone will find a test it fails, but that still leaves logic far ahead of untestable religious presuppositions.

Nope.

There is a whole branches of soft science known as psychology devoted to the study of human behavior that encompasses studying emotions as well. And all humans are capable if introspection to examine their actions and the causes, including their emotional reactions.

Not sure I agree, since evolution molded the mechanisms that produce our emotions, almost certainly because they increased our ability to produce offspring successfully. Which would mean we share the same or similar mechanisms of fear, jealousy, hate and yes, love. Either way it doesn’t matter because how well we can share or communicate emotional feelings is of course irrelevant to the topic of how we perceive actual reality.

Actually, Rationalists are unaware of their presuppositions because they deny the existence of the unconscious mind.

You've proven too much. If physicalism is true then psychology is nothing more than bad neuroscience. Once we agree that all is reducible to the physical then the only thing we need to do is study the matter itself and how matter interacts with the laws of nature.

That’s like saying we don’t need architects and engineers to design buildings, all we need to do is look at the atoms. Some day maybe, but not today. Psychology for all it’s limitations and problems is the best we have.

"Psychology for all it’s limitations and problems is the best we have"

This is an appeal to reason as grounds for believing reason is a reliable indicator of truth.

Does psychology operate entirely within the bounds of rationality?

It depends on how you mean "rational." It's the study of the human mind and behavior, with a heavy emphasis on the visceral, felt sense, emotions, subconscious, integration, human potential, self-expression, self-connection redressing self-alienation, and more.

If when we say rational we just mean it doesn't need to defy the rational, then yes, the discipline certainly aspires to be entirely rational. If by rational you have the shallow understanding of just some kind of intellectual/logic thing, then of course no, psychology does not limit itself to some kind of data process Spock thing. That's just a caricature of what rationality is.

Psychology isn’t pure reasoning, its theories rest on studies that have reproducibility problems due to the natural variance in and complexity of individual humans.

But yes reason and evidence is all we have, whether atheist or theist. Otherwise you might as well assume we are all being hosted in matrix pods with every experience fed to us by our computer overlords.

So today a true believing dude is pinned down several times with the question: Which is worse, wearing mixed fabrics or slavery? And for the life of him, he couldn't answer the question because he knew where it led about his perfect father.

In religion, we start with belief and dogma, final and irreversible, and then organize our worldview around that. Incoming info in conflict with that is rejected, and incoming info that outright disproves the belief is an abomination.

Is the conscience real or not?

So, because some people are unable to give reasonable answers, aren't well-informed or haven't constructed good theological arguments, religion is dumb?

Don't some people do the same thing with politics?

No, it’s because no one, including luminaries such as William Lane Craig, are able to give reasonable arguments or evidence for god.

Irrelevant whatsboutism. just because people make irrational arguments for things that aren’t religion doesn’t mean we should accept irrational arguments for religion.

Government and politics exist. They aren't a supernatural claim backed by nothing, waxed on and on about by people privy to special knowledge who can never seem to explain how they got so special.

The dude on the "mixed fabrics versus slavery" thing is no exception. He's the rule. It wasn't bad theology or bad arguments. The dynamic in his mind was lying and evading when the truth was going to establish something about the belief system.

This is taking my response to FellaGaga in a different direction. He basically said that some guy couldn't give him a good answer to a question, implying he's right about the subject and that there aren't alternatives. Anyway, if you're asking for scientific evidence then you're looking in the wrong place.

I'm not saying that people should accept anything, but let's not pretend as if that assessment is exclusive to religion or a sound criticism of it. You could say the same thing about activists, fanbases and academics.