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Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

" before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time "

Age 12 is pretty young to come to that conclusion.

Also, it's not about direct rational inquiry, yes it can sometimes a source of aberration, but that would be missing the point.

Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good.

'Reasoning' is just a tool of the mind.

Science is a tool, not a Truth.

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> that would be missing the point.

Which is?

> Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good.

It can be, for some people. Not all. My personal relationship to the greater good has more to do with reasoned arguments rather than spirituality.

> 'Reasoning' is just a tool of the mind. Would you agree it's a highly important tool?

Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe.

In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason.

In order to even accept the very notion of 'reason' you have to accept some kind of higher truth.

In addition you have to accept that there is 'a reasoner'.

You can't avoid taking a metaphysical posture - this is the anti-rational position that a lot of knee-jerk opposition to religion is founded upon.

There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason' - the Church founded all the best/most Universities in the world, and every other university is modelled after that.

The Motto of the Ivy Leagues are: 'Truth' or 'Truth and Light' or 'Light' etc. i.e. metaphysical aspirations.

Religion is the contemplation of higher order truths, mixed in with a bunch of applied social stuff.

Therefore: "Preferring Reasoning to Religion" is to misunderstand religion (i.e. Apples to Oranges), although to be fair, a lot of religious adherents do have a problem with that as well.

> Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe.

No, it doesn't. (Scientific materialism posits rules, it concludes (or models with) randomness only where the best efforts to model rules without randomness fail.

> In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason.

False. There's not teleological purpose, if that's what you mean by “reason”, which is a heavily overloaded term, but all the others (including reason in its causal sense) are compatible with scientific materialism.

> There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason'

That depends on the Church; and recently the ones which don't have a fundamental conflict with reason have been losing people to irreligion, while those which do have such a conflict have had all the growth. So, over time, the religion that exists progressively has more of a conflict with reason.

Religion is just a tool too. It's just not wielded by the flock, but rather by someone that wants to control the actions of the flock.

Spirituality can be something else altogether, but usually just boils down to magical thinking.

Religion is a social organization and embodiment of a Spiritual practice.

Technically, not necessary, but that would be like saying, technically, humans do not need 'each other' or need 'education' In reality, we do, immensely. When we don't have it wee seek it out learning ans religion, couched in different terms.

A good example is 'Yoga'. Yoga is 100% a religious practice, it's Hatha Yoga, a subdomain of Hinduism. Yoga exists to help prepare the body to be enlightened, specifically via the Kundalini Fire.

By removing the direct, religious language from Yoga, it's promulgators hoped to make it more amenable and acceptable to Westerners and it has been. (I do Yoga myself).

But merely changing the words to make them 'not seem religious' doesn't really change the underlying religious practice.

Isn't Spirituality also a tool, that enables you to understand and improve your relationship to the greater good?

All tools have value, in some context or another

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