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.