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b_b  ·  4549 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Founders: Religion, Virtue, and Morality and the Success of the American Nation?
By saying the Bible isn't rational, I didn't mean to imply that it is without wisdom, or that one can't gain perspective by studying its contents. Although there are certainly logical inconsistencies in its pages, and one could argue whether this or that passage is or is not rational, I was talking more generally about faith.

I'm admittedly not a man of faith, so I don't have a deep understanding of it, but it seems to me (again, as an outsider) that part of the point of faith is to shed one's connection to the world of logic and rationality and try to gain some other type of experience (spiritual peace or enlightenment, for example, I suppose).

On a related note, when I said the Bible was irrational, it was not meant as a pejorative. I'm not naive enough to think that hyper rationality is in any way a desirable way to live. There are many things that can't in principle be rationalized. To return to the Constitution, I think this can actually be a problem in our legal system. A courtroom is a forum where rationality is given great weight, and it can lead to strange outcomes, where, say, one man goes to prison for light shoplifting, while another goes free on a technicality after committing murder. I won't pretend to know a better alternative, but I think it is clear that rationality isn't always good or desirable.