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The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth

Book by Solomon Schimmel · 1 quotes · Faith, God, Rationality

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The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth Quotes

“If He were just a theory, just a doctrine, with no experience of Him woven into us, I doubt that faith in Him would ever last long. . Of course, it can't be proved that what happened to me was more than psychological...Once you believe God and He becomes real, the doubts of the intellect, while difficult and persistent and demanding answers, lose some of their power, because you have the sense that the part of you that doubts and mocks and postures as heroic for doing so is only the blind part, and that this part is not to be given as much credence as you gave it before you had an experience of God. I was not convinced by rational argument of things I had not believed before—instead, I saw them through another faculty entirely, and my reason has followed along in the wake of that experience, examining the evidence, sifting the facts, analyzing the possibilities of deception or contradiction … but always knowing itself to be in the presence of something greater than itself, something that it dare not try to mock or erase or entirely belittle. Reason has been eager to investigate whether my experience can be evaluated in an intellectual way and yet stand. But reason comes along behind, it cannot have the last word; it is mute even when it occasionally has the impulse to mock or to challenge, and speaks mostly when it has rational insight into the thing greater than itself (faith)—or into some aspect of it, since reason is unable to completely understand or explain … My inner life has become more real to me than my intellectual life, if I may distinguish them. Light simply explains itself—or doesn't explain, just shines. Once I had seen this sort of light pouring down on everything, my interest in intellectual things was to probe this mystery from the intellectual angle—not so much to prove that it could be true (although that is always interesting!) as to support by reason, if it's possible, why it is true. I was willing to assent to things that could not be proven on an intellectual basis because the results of believing that they were true had a power that surpassed comprehension.”

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Book:The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth
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