I totally fail to see how taking something on as an axiom makes it rational. What belief would fail this test?
A belief that is not consonant with the experience of the believer, since when we choose fundamental axioms, we have only our own experience to rely on.
But did you do so as a result of reasonable arguments?
The time I became an atheist as a teenager, yes (at least what I thought were reasonable arguments at the time; I know more epistemology now than I did then.)
What changed your mind?
The mental gymnastics I had to do to keep ignoring my perception of the divine were driving me insane.
It's hard to see it as a demonstration of a commitment to rationality when the result of that engagement is that your views are placed out of the reach of reason.
At this point, all I can say is that I don't think you understand epistemology as well as you think you do. I wish I could introduce you to my metaphysics supervisor (no longer alive, sadly).
But it isn't, because you successfully eg made cups of tea and such when you were an atheist; you didn't succumb to total inability to think due to universal skepticism. If you have the power to reason about ordinary things, then we can start to talk about less prosaic things starting from there.
I think you'll have to let me judge what are satisfactory levels of sense for me. Making a cup of tea was certainly still possible, but it required far more spoons because of the effort of ignoring things that seem to me more real than the cup and the tea in order to reach past them to manipulate the less-real things. God, to me, is not less ordinary than the tea.
no subject
A belief that is not consonant with the experience of the believer, since when we choose fundamental axioms, we have only our own experience to rely on.
But did you do so as a result of reasonable arguments?
The time I became an atheist as a teenager, yes (at least what I thought were reasonable arguments at the time; I know more epistemology now than I did then.)
What changed your mind?
The mental gymnastics I had to do to keep ignoring my perception of the divine were driving me insane.
It's hard to see it as a demonstration of a commitment to rationality when the result of that engagement is that your views are placed out of the reach of reason.
At this point, all I can say is that I don't think you understand epistemology as well as you think you do. I wish I could introduce you to my metaphysics supervisor (no longer alive, sadly).
But it isn't, because you successfully eg made cups of tea and such when you were an atheist; you didn't succumb to total inability to think due to universal skepticism. If you have the power to reason about ordinary things, then we can start to talk about less prosaic things starting from there.
I think you'll have to let me judge what are satisfactory levels of sense for me. Making a cup of tea was certainly still possible, but it required far more spoons because of the effort of ignoring things that seem to me more real than the cup and the tea in order to reach past them to manipulate the less-real things. God, to me, is not less ordinary than the tea.
Edited for typo