Skeptics and Mystics

I spend too much time on MetaFil­ter, but I find it quite intel­lec­tu­al­ly stim­u­lat­ing when I don’t find it quite sil­ly. Sub­lime and ridicu­lous. Any­way, I’m some­what of a minor­i­ty there since I’m Catholic and it seems at least the most vocal peo­ple are quite sec­u­lar. This is good for me.

This is good for me because it chal­lenges me to rec­on­cile unrea­son with rea­son and belief with fact. I’m not going to men­tion truth [except for these cou­ple of sen­tences] because truth and fact are two dif­fer­ent things to me. Facts are true, but not all truths are fact. So I should change the instances of fact in this post to truth. Maybe I’ll go into more detail on that some­time. Con­tin­u­ing:

The peo­ple that chal­lenge my beliefs most often are empiri­cists. They take fact, log­ic and rea­son as their tools for liv­ing life. I am not much of an empiri­cist. Yes, I have some of that Ger­man­ic love of see­ing every­thing set out order­ly, well-dia­grammed and in its place, but that is use­ful to me only as a place from which to leap into the unknown. I like cal­cu­la­tions but I’m not cal­cu­lat­ing. I have no real use for the sci­en­tif­ic method.

My unrea­son isn’t the most use­ful of things, but to me it is a sight more inter­est­ing than log­ic alone. I’ve run across skep­tics who believe noth­ing unless they can see empir­i­cal evi­dence and I’ve met mys­tics who will believe the cra­zi­est tripe despite empir­i­cal evi­dence to the con­trary. I try to keep my own path right in the mid­dle. Things that can­not be proven nor dis­proven empir­i­cal­ly [onto­log­i­cal here we go!] are what intrigue me and give me the most exer­cise.

So when I am chal­lenged in my unrea­son­able­ness at believ­ing that a high­er pow­er is respon­si­ble for this that is, it seems like the peo­ple who do this are the ones who are pure skep­tics. Hm, I don’t think I’m explain­ing this too well. It isn’t sup­posed to sound like a fight.

Start­ing again but not from the begin­ning: I am quite open to engag­ing in ideas and the­o­ries that can be nei­ther proven nor dis­proven, as futile as it might seem. I’m unrea­son­able in that sense. But I had to fig­ure out what sep­a­rat­ed me from the mys­tics who believe in the Hol­low Earth or that flu­o­ride in the water is a communist/government plot to killus/dispose of tox­ic waste. The hard­core empiri­cists [not the empiri­cists who just want proof], the ones who get livid at the fact that unrea­son exists are the folks who have helped me shuf­fle out and solid­i­fy my own curi­ous unrea­son and mys­ti­cism. I’ll give a well-thought-out but unprove­able asser­tion a good lis­ten­ing and if I find it to be valu­able will believe in it as far as I find it to be use­ful. But while I believe that some­thing as seem­ing­ly far-out as telepa­thy has dis­tinct pos­si­bil­i­ties, I refuse to call it super­nat­ur­al, some­thing I think is impos­si­ble.

Hm.

Just because some­thing is unproven, does­n’t mean it should be dis­missed as idio­cy.

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