Entries in Life

Mark, thanks for providing this forum. If you wrote this, as Dan wrote Flutterby, EXCELLENT....... good for you!

Dan's original comment, as I read it, and his later comment talked about trying to understand the perspective of someone who would accept religion KNOWING there is no possible logical challenge to the belief. This is about the psychology of people, like yourself, who would choose to embrace ideas (be they nationalistic, racist, or religious) without having a logical leg to stand on.

ORIGINALLY, I stated my beef with religion. You gave me some excellent info about the Eastern Church and I thank you for it. There's little exposure in the southern US to Orthodoxy.

As the discussion ensued, I began to explore more of Dan's issue, rather than my own. That issue, which I've tried to adopt, is that the psychology of folks like you is hard to wrap my head around. You are, from your resume and posts, an intelligent, highly logical human in most areas of your life, but in the matter of religion you seem to have taken another path.

Let me try to set an example, but I'm not a programmer (I've dabbled, but I KNOW real programmers like Dan and I'm not one) and I sense you are, so this may make little sense:

You're writing a project which requires some data coupling to work, but NO TESTING IS POSSIBLE. One chance.... no re-writes.... the code you write originally is your only chance. You, however, don't have full access to one of the modules involved, but you have some strong feelings about how it will treat data it receives. When coding the project, you'd LIKELY do the expedient thing and attempt to avoid the unknown module as much as possible, and CERTAINLY try to minimize the role it played in the project. You'd adopt that method because it is the route which will MOST LIKELY produce the best code. It is the logical path when dealing with illogical/unknown elements which cannot be avoided..... minimize them, don't emphasize them.

Now, I'm not going to insult you by explaining the metaphor above in detail and how it applies to your adoption of religion for your life, but it hopefully explains my point better.

There's little to add to that. I've probably been verbose earlier and I apologize.