This response comes based on my thinking about the post in the “Faith, Logic, and Paranormal” thread that says, “I’m a non-believer, but I would accept proofs otherwise…”
If you are wont to follow, (as many are even if they are unaware of the terminology), the Hegelian idea that dialectical progression lays transparent the mind of God, being as it is, according to Hegel, equivalent to the logical structure of the universe, then you have your answer.
How could a true believer in pure logic seek anywhere else but in the furthering of the scala paradisi? It’s not logical ;) And you trap yourself to go any further. The idea THAT you can trap yourself means one of two things: either your logic reasoning and rhetoric skills are piss poor, or that logic cannot account for everything. To allow the possibility of logic not accounting for everything could be seen as destroying the very premise of your argument, unless you can make a relation that “you can not know what you don’t know” and therefore, dialectical progression explains the “paranormal” quite easily.
It cannot be argued that logic only lays as a companion to science. When early humans thought that thunder signaled a god was angry with them, and they made sacrifices to appease said god: if the storms abated the tribe would make a quite logical assumption that they had pleased the god. This was not a faith based maneuver, this was based on calculated logic. The idea of god(s) was not a debatable concept as it is now. And so here we see an example of completely rational worship.
Modernity simply transferred us from an iron cage to a gilded one. Yes, we know “god(s) are dead” because we can explain the thunder now. Or is it that we have simply reached the pinnacle of our tower. Logic as the screaming bride of science only takes us so far, and we have to cap off all dissenters or the modernity program may appear to not work. We can’t include the Dionysian influences of the mad, arguably some of our greatest artists and thinkers, because they fall outside of our science cage. So we lock them up, we stigmatize and criminalize them. For modern society to work, for science to progress upon a logical path we have become a society of stereotypes. Culturally arranged and sanitized archetypes. The businessman, the worker, the landlord, the tenant: locked into classes so rigid that to move outside an arranged category automatically signals your fellows that you are breaking rules; That you are not acting logically, perhaps this makes you crazy. Perhaps we call you a criminal.
We suffer from too much knowledge rather than too little. We answer, think and live based on the pseudo-identities that many of us have adopted as the result of the non-stop indoctrination of normalizing institutions. We have even normalized god, the very most of paranormal concepts. Here, god wears Levi’s and has blue eyes. There, god wears a kurta and has brown eyes. We have become removed from the responsibility of our own existential choices. We hear the collective cry of wanting to know who we are, and yet in the same breath continue the pattern of horizontal social migration that continues moves us farther from the answer to the question.
Modernity has forced us to move away from ourselves, this is why we don’t know who we are. Faith is the only tool we have left to construct our own identities. Faith is a deliberate slap in the face to reason; faith itself being completely offensive to logic because it can only exist in the face of the absurd. The paradox that the infinite and the immortal can be incarnated in time as a finite mortal is the only explanation that we have for the soul. And to accept the paradox as completely rational based on faith alone is perhaps the spark that transfigures the actual, real, logical science based world into the ideal; a transubstantiation of the actual finite world into an actual reconciliation with the infinite.
