Quote:
Originally Posted by craig1120
Rationality cannot lead you into the chaotic unknown, which is where one must go to avoid getting stuck in the moral journey. You have a conscience to lead you. The conscience leads rationality when you have reasons on each side. It makes the ultimate value judgment on which reasons are better. Your instinct for meaning resides in your conscience.
You have a current version of self associated with your status quo conscience. Then, you have the higher conscience connected to a new version of self competing against the status quo. A shrewd and sophisticated strategy the current self + conscience will use to defend and preserve its position is to hold the belief that the rational intellect is what drives moral progress when it actually preserves the status quo by intervening between the self and the higher conscience.
What I’m saying is true, but you can’t believe me because most of you is the current version of self protecting its position. The best you can do is doubt. In that doubt, the seed of the higher, future self can begin to grow.
There are plenty of things in which a rational take looks straight at and says, "Yup, that's unknown." It is the religious zealot that refuses the unknown by believing in the certainty of fairy tale answers. I live in the unknown mystery. When I briefly claimed I was a Christian, it was actually the result of disowned fear, and what it really meant was "I'm joining this club because I'm insecure and to assuage existential issues which it's easier to face with a fairy tale than with reality." Add the pure capitulation to cultural norms under the pressure of anxiety to indoctrination, and you have the religious masses, who are massively skewed, of course, to the dominant religion of their culture regardless of what it is. THAT is refusing the chaotic unknown and opting for convention.